
Class L&ZSLL- 

Book J?1IL_. 

GopightN ._ ^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



L 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/routineidealsbylOObrig 



3Sp IHSaron E* $xi$$& 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS. i6mo, $1.00 net. 
Postage extra. 

SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND CHARACTER. 
i6mo, $1.00 net. Postage 8 cents. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



ROUTINE AND 
IDEALS 

By LeBaron Russell Briggs 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1904 






LIBRA! 




Two Copies 


Received 


NOV 8 


1904 


Copyriffftt 


tniry 


CLASS CL XXc, No; J 
/£) / 6 / »+- 

copy e, J 






COPYRIGHT I904 BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published November , IQ04 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 



PREFACE 



Of the papers collected in this volume the 
" Commencement Address at Wellesley 
College " has been printed in pamphlet 
form ; the "Address to the School Chil- 
dren of Concord " appears in the memo- 
rial volume issued by The Social Circle 
in Concord and is reprinted with the per- 
mission of John Shepard Keyes, Esq. ; 
" The Mistakes of College Life " belongs 
in a volume of Belmont (California) 
School Talks and is printed here with 
the permission of Mr. William T. Reid ; 
"Harvard and the Individual" is re- 
printed from the Boston Transcript with 
the permission of Mr. E. H. Clement; 
and "Mater Fortissima' , has appeared 
in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine. 

The book, like its predecessor, "School, 
College, and Character," contains no 
new ideas and only a few old ones. In 



vm 



PREFACE 



this respect it is much like other collec- 
tions of sermons — for that the addresses 
are sermons there is no denying. Ser- 
mons or a single sermon ; and the text 
is twofold : "Be thou faithful unto death," 
and " Where there is no vision the peo- 
ple perish." 

L. B. R. BRIGGS. 

Cambridge, September, 1904. 



TO ADAMS SHERMAN HILL 

EVERY PART OF THIS BOOK THA T WILL BEAR 
HIS SCRUTINY IS AFFECTIONA TEL Y DEDICA TED 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. ROUTINE AND IDEALS : A SCHOOL AND 

COLLEGE ADDRESS i 

II. HARVARD AND THE INDIVIDUAL . . 39 

III. ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL CHILDREN OF 

CONCORD 63 

IV. COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT WELLES- 

LEY COLLEGE 91 

V. DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL AND COLLEGE . 137 
VI. THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE LIFE . . 183 
VII. MATER FORTISSIMA ,223 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

A SCHOOL AND COLLEGE ADDRESS 

THE older I grow, the more strongly I 
feel that the best thing in man or wo- 
man is being " there." Physical bravery, 
which is always inspiring, is surprisingly 
common ; but the sure and steady quality 
of being " there " belongs to compara- 
tively few. This is why we hear on every 
hand, " If you want a thing well done, 
do it yourself; " not because the man who 
wants it done is best able to do it* but 
because to many persons it seems a hope- 
less quest to look for any one who cares 
enough for them, who can put himself 
vigorously enough into their places, to 
give them his best, to give them intelli- 
gent, unremitting, loyal service until the 
job is done, — not half done, or nine 



4 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

tenths done, or ninety-nine hundredths 
done, but done, with intelligence and de- 
votion in every nail he drives, or every 
comma he writes. Some are reluctant, 
some afraid of doing more than they are 
paid for, some indifferent, some obli- 
gingly helpful but not well trained and 
not so deeply devoted as to train them- 
selves. I suppose that in one sphere of 
life or another a number of these persons 
earn what they get. Yet sometimes I 
think there are only two kinds of ser- 
vice, — that which is not worth having 
at any price, and that for which no 
money can pay. All of us know a few 
who give this latter kind of service, and 
know what they are to us, and to every 
one with whom they deal. These are 
the people who are " there." 

Now being "there" is the result of 
three things, — intelligence, constant 
practice, and something hard to define 
but not too fancifully called an ideal. Of 
intelligence everybody can see the need ; 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 5 

but not everybody knows how little 
quickness of mind is required. As Sena- 
tor Hoar once told the highest scholars 
in Harvard College, much of the good 
work in the world has been that of dull 
men who have done their best. Moder- 
ate intelligence, with devotion behind it, 
and with constant exercise in the right 
direction, has produced some of the most 
valuable among men and women. 
n! The best thing education can do is to 
make moral character efficient through 
mental discipline. Here we come to the*^ 
need of training, and to the question 
whether the education of to-day trains 
boys and girls (I do not say as it should, 
but as it might) for thorough, and re- 
sponsible, and unselfish work. 

Professor A. S. Hill cautions writers 
against " announcing platitudes as if 
they were oracles," and against " apolo- 
gizing for them as if they were original 
sin." I am in danger of both these trans- 
gressions. In proclaiming that there is no 



6 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

education without hard work, I may seem 
to proclaim a platitude of the first water ; 
yet you can hardly call any proposition 
a platitude if its acceptance depends on 
its interpretation. To me the proposi- 
tion means, nobody can get an education 
without working for it ; to some others 
it appears to mean, nobody can get an 
education without other people's work- 
ing to give it to him, or even to make 
him like it well enough to take it ; and 
my interpretation, that he cannot get it 
without working hard himself, though it 
strikes me as so obvious that I am half 
ashamed to mention it, strikes others as 
a reversion to a narrow and harsh con- 
servatism, to the original sin of a time 
when an education was a Procrustes 
bed, which now strained and stretched 
the mind until it broke, and now lopped 
every delicate outgrowth of the soul. 

Of all discoveries in modern education 
the most beautiful is the recognition of 
individual need and individual claim, 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 7 

of the infinite and fascinating variety in 
human capacity, of the awful responsi- 
bility for those who by the pressure of 
dull routine would stifle a human soul, 
of the almost divine mission for those 
who help a human soul into the fulness 
of life. For what is nearer the divine 
than to see that a child has life, and 
has it more abundantly? "The past was 
wrong," says the educator of to-day; " let 
us right it. Education has been dark 
and cruel ; let us make it bright and 
kind." Thus it comes to pass that, as 
many a prosperous father whose boy- 
hood was pinched by poverty is deter- 
mined that his son shall not suffer as he 
himself has suffered, and throws away 
on him money which he in turn throws 
away on folly and on vice, — as such a 
father saps a young man's strength in 
trying to be generous, so does many 
an educator of to-day, atoning for the 
cruelty of the past by the enervating 
luxury of the present, sap a child's 



8 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

strength in trying to be kind, change a 
Procrustes bed to a bed of roses. Cruel 
as it is to assume that a boy or a girl 
who is dull in one or two prescribed 
subjects is a dunce, it may be equally 
cruel to watch every inclination of the 
young mind, and to bend school re- 
quirements to its desires and whims. 
How many persons we know whose 
lives and whose friends' lives are em- 
bittered because they have had from 
childhood their own way, and who, if 
their eyes are once opened to the sel- 
fishness of their position, denounce the 
weakness of those who in their child- 
hood yielded to them ! Unless we aban- 
don as obsolete the notion that children 
are the better for obedience, why should 
we give them full swing in the choice 
of a time for doing sums or for learning 
to read ? If we do not insist that a boy 
shall brush his hair till he longs to have 
it smooth, and if then we brush it for 
him, we are not educating him in either 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 9 

neatness or efficiency; and for aught 
I can see, the analogy holds good. I 
once knew a boy of sixteen or seven- 
teen whose mother had done most of 
his reading for him. His eyes were 
sharp enough for things he liked (such 
as turtles and snakes); but he had 
trained them so little in the alphabet that 
in Latin he was quite impartial in decid- 
ing whether u followed by t was ut or 
tu. The effect on his translation may be 
easily conceived. I do not mean that he 
made this particular mistake many times ; 
I mean that he was constantly making 
mistakes of this character ; that in general 
he had not been trained to observe just 
what were the letters before him, or in 
what order they came. Why then teach 
him Latin? He was to be a scientific 
man, and needed some language beside 
his own : yet how could he learn a foreign 
language ? how could he learn his own 
language ? how could he learn anything 
from a book ? how was he training him- 



io ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

self to be " there " ? " Do not make a 
child read," some educators say, "until 
he finds the need of reading, and learns 
for his own pleasure. Do not enfeeble 
his mind by forcing it." "Do not en- 
feeble his mind," one might answer, " by 
letting it go undisciplined." If he begins 
late, when he has felt the need, he may 
learn to read rapidly ; but will he have 
the patience for those small accuracies 
which form the basis of accuracy in later 
life, and which, unless learned early, are 
seldom learned at all ? Do not give the 
child long hours ; do not take away the 
freshness of his mind by pressing him ; 
go slowly, but go thoroughly. Teach 
him, whatever he does, to do it as well 
as he can. Then show him how next 
time he can do better ; and when next 
time comes, make him do better. How- 
ever short the school hours may be, 
however much outside of the school may 
rouse or charm his mind, make him feel 
that school standards are high, that 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS n 

school work is to be done, and done well. 
If you are teaching a girl to sweep, you 
do not let her sweep the lint under the 
table. Why, if you are teaching a child 
to study, should you let him study in a 
slovenly way ? Why, for instance, should 
you teach him reading without spelling? 
Get into him as early as you can a habit 
of thoroughness as an end in itself, of 
thoroughness for its own sake, and he 
will soon find that being thorough is 
interesting; that against the pain of 
working when he feels indolent, he may 
match the pain of not doing what ought 
to be done, just as one kind of microbe 
is injected to kill another. When he 
once gets this habit firmly fixed in him 
(I may say, when it has once fixed itself 
upon him), he may have all sorts of in- 
tellectual freedom and be safe. 
.: Immature people constantly cry out 
against routine. Yet routine is an almost 
necessary condition of effective human 
life. An undisciplined genius, like Shel- 



12 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

ley's, inspires now and then ; a spirit like 
Milton's, as eager for liberty, and as 
impatient of bondage, yet forced, by the 
man it animated, to do his bidding, 
which rightly or wrongly he believed to 
be the bidding of God, inspires oftener 
and deeper. If routine is forced upon us, 
we are delivered from the great tempta- 
tion of letting industry become a matter 
of caprice, and of waiting for perfect 
mental and physical conditions (Italiam 
fugientem ) before we settle down to our 
work. If routine is not forced upon us, 
we must force it upon ourselves, or we 
shall go to pieces. " Professor X is a 
dry teacher. Shakspere is the greatest 
of poets, and hence one of the greatest 
inspirers of men. Why is n't it better to 
cut Professor X's lecture and read Shak- 
spere, — or even to read Kipling ?" First 
and obviously, because you can read 
Shakspere at another time, whereas Pro- 
fessor X's lecture is given at a fixed hour, 
is part of a course, and a link in an im- 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 13 

portant chain. Next, because attending 
Professor X's lecture is for the time be- 
ing your business. The habit of attend- 
ing to business is a habit you must form 
and keep, before you can be regarded 
as "there." Moreover this habit does 
away with all manner of time-wasting 
indecision. If you take the hour for 
Shakspere, you may spend half of it 
in questioning what play to begin, or 
whether to read another author after all, 
— and meantime a friend drops in. "I 
know a person," says Professor James, 
" who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, 
pick dust-specks from the floor, arrange 
his table, snatch up the newspaper, take 
down any book which catches his eye, 
trim his nails, waste the morning any- 
how, in short, and all without premedi- 
tation, — simply because the one thing 
he ought to attend to is the preparation 
of a noon-day lesson in formal logic 
which he detests — anything but that! " 
It is astonishing how eagerly men strug- 



14 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

gle to escape from the training that pre- 
pares them for life, how they labor to 
convince themselves that what they long 
to do is worthier and nobler than what 
they ought to do — and must do if they 
are to succeed in what they long to do. 
I once knew a student, against all ad- 
vice, to leave college in the middle of 
the Freshman year, because, since he 
was going into the ministry, he was 
eager to devote his whole time to the 
Bible. Later he saw his mistake, and 
came back. I knew another and a wiser 
student who, having gone into the min- 
istry without a college education, left it 
for years of sacrifice in money and of the 
hardest kind of work, to win that know- 
ledge of books and men without which 
no modern minister is equipped for effi- 
cient service. The efficient people are 
those who know their business and do it 
promptly and patiently, who when lei- 
sure comes have earned it, and know 
they have earned it ; who when one 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 15 

thing is done can turn their attention 
squarely and completely to the next 
thing, and do that. The efficient student 
is he who has as nearly as possible a 
fixed time for every part of his work ; 
who, if he has a recitation at ten and 
another at twelve, knows in advance 
what he is to study at eleven. He has 
most time for work and most time for 
unalloyed play, since he makes use of 
that invaluable friend to labor, — routine. 
" Habit,' ' says the Autocrat of the Break- 
fast Table, "is a labor-saving invention 
which enables a man to get along with 
less fuel, — that is all; for fuel is force, 
you know, just as much in the page I 
am writing for you as in the locomo- 
tive or the legs which carry it to you." 
i * Habit," says Professor James, " simplifies 
our movements, makes them accurate, 
and diminishes fatigue." " Man, " he 
continues, " is born with a tendency to 
do more things than he has ready-made 
arrangements for in his nerve-centres. 



16 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

Most of the performances of other animals 
are automatic. But in him the number of 
them is so enormous that most of them 
must be the fruit of painful study. If 
practice did not make perfect, nor habit 
economize the expense of nervous and 
muscular energy, he would be in a sorry 
plight. As Dr. Maudsley says : 'If an 
act became no easier after being done 
several times, if the careful direction of 
consciousness were necessary to its ac- 
complishment on each occasion, it is 
evident that the whole activity of a life- 
time might be confined to one or two 
deeds — that no progress could take place 
in development. A man might be oc- 
cupied all day in dressing and undress- 
ing himself; the attitude of his body 
would absorb all his attention and en- 
ergy ; the washing of his hands or the 
fastening of a button would be as diffi- 
cult to him on each occasion as to the 
child on its first trial ; and he would, 
furthermore, be completely exhausted by 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 17 

his exertions.' " " The great thing, then, 
in all education," says Professor James, 
"is to make our nervous system our ally 
instead of our enemy. It is to fund and 
capitalize our acquisitions, and live at 
ease upon the interest of the fund. For 
this we must make automatic and habit- 
ual, as early as possible, as many useful 
actions as we can, and guard against 
the growing into ways that are likely 
to be disadvantageous to us, as we 
should guard against the plague. The 
more of the details of our daily life we 
can hand over to the effortless custody 
of automatism, the more our higher 
powers of mind will be set free for their 
own proper work. There is no more 
miserable human being than one in 
whom nothing is habitual but indeci- 
sion. . . . Full half the time of such a 
man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of 
matters which ought to be so ingrained 
in him as practically not to exist for his 
consciousness at all. If there be such 



18 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

daily duties not yet ingrained in any one 
of my readers, let him begin this very 
hour to set the matter right." 

All this shows the true meaning of 
thoroughness. I have heard it said that 
thoroughness in education is precisely 
what we do not want, since thorough 
work becomes mechanical work, and 
robs the student of that creative joy 
which should accompany every exercise 
of the mind. Yet it is the "effortless 
custody of automatism" in the lower 
things that frees the mind for creative 
joy in the higher. The pianist who 
cannot through long practice commit 
to routine all the ordinary movements of 
the fingers on the keys can never play 
the music of Schumann or of Beethoven. 
Sometimes I think that our happiness 
depends chiefly on our cheerful accept- 
ance of routine, on our refusal to as- 
sume, as many do, that daily work and 
daily duty are a kind of slavery. If 
we can learn to think of routine as 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 19 

the best economy, we shall not despise 
it. People call it benumbing ; and so it 
is if we do not understand it : but if we 
understand that through it we can do 
more work in less time, and have more 
time left for the expansion of our souls, 
that through it we cultivate the habit 
which makes people know we can be 
counted on, we shall cease to say hard 
things of it. Even in those whose lives 
are narrowly circumscribed, we see the 
splendid courage and fidelity which 
come with faithful routine. The longer 
I live, the more I admire as a class the 
women who fill small positions in New 
England public schools, the typical 
schoolmistresses or " schoolmarms " of 
our more Puritanical towns and villages. 
Their notions of English grammar are 
as inflexible as their notions of duty ; 
like Overbury's Pedant, they " dare not 
think a thought that the nominative 
case governs not the verb ; " their theo- 
logy may be as narrow as their philology ; 



20 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

they have little primnesses that make us 
smile : but they have the hearts of hero- 
ines. Pitifully paid, often with others to 
support, often subject to ignorant and 
wrong-headed committees, and obliged 
against every instinct to adopt new 
methods when education is periodically 
overhauled, often with little physical 
health, and living on courage and " wire," 
with few social diversions higher than 
the Sunday School picnic, and few hopes 
of rest in this world higher than the Home 
for Aged Women, they are at their posts 
day by day, week by week, year by year, 
because they are, as Milton said of 
Cromwell, 

" Guided by faith and matchless fortitude." 
What is more inspiring than the men and 
women who are " there," and "there" 
not in the high and ambitious moments 
of life, but on the obscure dead levels 
that take the heart out of any one 
who does not see the glory of common 
things ? 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 21 

These schoolmistresses, though they 
may not know it, illustrate the absolute 
necessity of routine for steadily effective 
living. In little things they may show 
the hard and wooden quality of a mind 
that works in the treadmill day after 
day, and may thus give a handle to those 
critics who scoff at routine ; but if their 
small accuracies seem pretentiously lit- 
tle, their devotion is unpretentiously 
great. Through habit, supported by un- 
yielding conscience, they have forced 
upon themselves a routine without which 
they could not live. 

A boy when he meets with loss or 
grief or disaster, or even when he feels 
the excitement of joyful expectation, is 
likely to stop work altogether. He has 
" no heart for it," he says ; he " cannot 
do it." A young man crossed in love, a 
young woman who loses father, mother, 
or bosom friend — these may pine and 
fret, and suffer the sorrow for days, or 
weeks, or months, to stop their lives, 



22 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

may cease to live except as burdens to 
themselves and others ; but, young or 
old, a trained man or woman whose 
heart and will are strong keeps on. 
There is always somebody or something 
to work for ; and while there is, life must 
be, and shall become, worth living. " In 
summer or winter/' said the proud ad- 
vertisement of an old steamboat line, 
" In summer or winter, in storm or calm, 
the Commonwealth and the Plymouth 
Rock invariably make the passage;" 
and this should be the truth about you 
and me. 

The use of routine to make a sad life 
endurable was once brought clearly be- 
fore my mind as I watched the polar 
bears in the Zoological Garden at Cen- 
tral Park. In a kind of grotto cut in a 
hillside, two polar bears were caged. 
Two sides of the cage were of sheer 
rock ; two were of iron, one separating 
the polar bears from the grizzly bears, 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 23 

and one separating them from the spec- 
tators in the Park. The floor of the 
grotto between the steep rock and the 
pool of water which represented the Arc- 
tic Ocean was narrow ; but on it one of 
the bears was exercising with a rhythmic 
motion strange and inexpressibly sad. 
He moved from the centre of the grotto 
two or three steps toward the rock, 
swung his head wide and low three 
times to the right and three times to the 
left, with a sweep like that of a scythe, 
stepped back two or three paces, com- 
pleting a sort of ellipse, stepped forward 
again, swung his head right and left 
again three times, precisely as before, — 
then back, then forward, then swinging, 
on and on and on. At intervals, whether 
with numerical precision or not I cannot 
say, he broke his circuit, walked to the 
iron fence between him and the grizzly 
bears, walked back, and began once 
more the round of motions devised, as it 
seemed, to save him from madness or 



24 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

from death. Three times that day I vis- 
ited him ; and always I found him at his 
self - appointed task, — forward, swing, 
back, forward, swing, back, on and on 
and on. The rocky bottom of his den 
was worn into holes where, always in the 
same spots, he set his feet in this forlorn 
attempt to put a saving routine into a 
hopeless life. Near him, in a narrow 
house with a little window-like door, a 
small brown bear moved round and 
round, casting one quick, sharp glance 
at the outer world in every round, as he 
walked briskly by the door; and in a 
neighboring house a hyena strode angrily 
back and forth, and back and forth, and 
back and forth again. Here were captive 
animals finding in routine the nearest 
possible approach to an enrichment of 
their lives. 

The reaction against routine in mod- 
ern education, the notion that children 
should be pleased with a variety of sub- 
jects made easy and interesting, rather 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 25 

than drilled in a few, and roused to in- 
terest themselves in these few and in 
the thoroughness that drill demands, ac- 
counts, I believe, in large measure for 
the collapse of many a student's will be- 
fore any subject that requires hard math- 
ematical thinking. In Harvard College 
an elementary course in philosophy used 
to begin with lectures on psychology, 
which fascinated the class ; but " oh, 
the heavy change " when in the second 
half-year psychology gave place to logic! 
The text -book, "Jevons's Elementary 
Lessons," is so simple that any youth of 
fair intelligence who will come to close 
quarters with it should master it with ease ; 
yet more than one student, apparently in 
full health and intelligence, declared that 
he could make nothing of it, that it was 
too hard for him altogether. He asked 
to leave the course, to count the first half 
of it toward his degree, and to take up 
something more congenial. These boys, 
through the labor-saving appliances of 



26 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

their schools, supplemented by their 
choice of lecture courses in college, had 
lost, or what is almost as bad, thought 
they had lost, the power of close logical 
application. Worst of all, they had lost 
the stimulus of surmounting difficulties. 
How were they training themselves to 
be "there"? 

I constantly meet students who declare 
that they cannot learn geometry. This 
commonly means that they hate geome- 
try so cordially as never to give it their 
close attention. There may be some in- 
telligent persons who cannot learn geo- 
metry ; but the vast majority of those 
who think they cannot learn it, learn it 
if they have to. 

" I hold very strongly," says Cardinal 
Newman, " that the first step in intellec- 
tual training is to impress upon a boy's 
mind the idea of science, method, order, 
principle, and system ; of rule and excep- 
tion, of richness and harmony. This is 
commonly and excellently done by mak- 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 27 

ing him begin with Grammar ; nor can 
too great accuracy, or minuteness and 
subtlety of teaching be used towards him, 
as his faculties expand, with this simple 
purpose. Hence it is that critical scholar- 
ship is so important a discipline for him 
when he is leaving school for the Uni- 
versity. A second science is the Mathe- 
matics : this should follow Grammar, still 
with the same object, viz., to give him a 
conception of development and arrange- 
ment from and around a common centre. 
Hence it is that Chronology and Geo- 
graphy are so necessary for him, when 
he reads History, which is otherwise lit- 
tle better than a story-book. Hence, too, 
Metrical Composition, when he reads 
Poetry ; in order to stimulate his powers 
into action in every practicable way, and 
to prevent a merely passive reception of 
images and ideas which in that case are 
likely to pass out of the mind as soon as 
they have entered it. Let him once gain 
this habit of method, of starting from 



28 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

fixed points, of making his ground good 
as he goes, of distinguishing what he 
knows from what he does not know, and 
I conceive he will be gradually initiated 
into the largest and truest philosophical 
views, and will feel nothing but impa- 
tience and disgust at the random theories 
and imposing sophistries and dashing 
paradoxes, which carry away half-formed 
and superficial intellects." 

The child who learns to do small things 
well when he is small gets the best train- 
ing for doing big things well when he is 
big. He lifts the calf every day; and 
behold, he has lifted the cow ! Wherever 
you go, you meet, not merely people who 
scamp their work, but people who do not 
know the difference between a good job 
and a bad one. " My great difficulty," 
says the master of a large private school, 
" is to find teachers who know anything, 
or who seem as if they had ever seen 
anybody that knew anything. They have 
plenty of * educational progress ' and 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 29 

' educational theory ; ' but they don't 
know anything." After all, why should 
they know anything ? They have a good 
deal of more or less accurate information, 
such as people get who have studied what 
came easiest and seemed at the time most 
interesting, and have let the rest go. 
Then, with a little pedagogy superadded, 
they have been turned loose to hand 
down their principles to others. " The 
Austrian ballet" [Australian ballot], a 
New York schoolgirl wrote in an exam- 
ination book, " was introduced into this 
country by Cleveland to corrupt the peo- 
ple and keep it secret." The state of mind 
evinced by this sentence has been too 
common in school children under any 
system of learning ; but I believe we do 
less to clear it now than when we paid 
more attention to those fundamental 
principles which tend to promote accu- 
racy in thought and in expression. 

I have said elsewhere — and I believe 
it with all my might — that one reason 



30 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

for the hold of athletic sport on our 
schools and colleges is its awakening in 
many boys their first, or almost their 
first, ambition to do something as well 
as it can be done, and the recognition of 
severe routine as a means to that end. 
In football they are judged by an in- 
numerable jury of their peers. Failure 
is public disgrace ; success, if decently 
bought, is glory. " Jack," said a great 
football player to a shiftless student 
whom he was trying to look after mor- 
ally, " did you ever do anything as well 
as you could ? " " No, Tom," said the 
other, " I don't believe I ever did." The 
amateur athlete is held up to his best 
by the immediate, certain, and wide- 
spread fame of good playing, and the 
equally prompt and notorious shame of 
bad playing. He is held up, further, by 
the conviction that what he is doing is 
for his college or for his school. Never 
again, unless he holds public office, will 
such a searchlight be turned on him ; 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 31 

and never again will so many persons 
see what he does or fails to do. As a re- 
sult, a thoroughly trained football player, 
meeting the supreme test, may find him- 
self lifted up by the inspiration of the 
moment, of the crowd, of the cheering, 
and of college patriotism, so that — as 
some one has put it — he plays better 
than he knows how. In a few instances 
every man in a team plays better than 
he knows how. 

Older people can hardly appreciate 
the stimulus to every power of mind and 
body in a great athletic contest. Here 
is work in which youth itself is an ad- 
vantage, in which the highest honor 
may be won by a young man who has 
missed all earlier opportunities for doing 
anything as well as he knew how ; here 
is a fresh chance to show of what stuff 
— mental and physical — he is made, 
and a cause that appeals to youth so 
strongly as to make obstacles springs of 
courage. Here is something that rouses 



32 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

a young man's powers as the elective 
system in study is designed to do, yet 
does not require that basis of intellectual 
accuracy which is essential to success in 
study. Here, also, is something in which 
a young man who can succeed knows 
that success may mean an opening for 
the work of his life. Thousands of men 
actually see his success with their own 
eyes ; thousands more hear of it. If on 
graduation he applies for work, he is 
not the unknown quantity that a young 
graduate usually is. He has already 
been tried in times of stress and found 
not wanting. If, as sometimes happens, 
he has shown, not merely that he is al- 
ways to be counted on, but that in the 
thick of things he is inspired and inspir- 
ing, he has marked himself as a leader 
of men. Besides, no man can thoroughly 
succeed in football who plays for himself 
alone. There are few more searching 
tests of men's motives and spirit. This is 
why class officers chosen from football 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 33 

players are almost invariably good men. 
On the gridiron field their classmates 
learn who have self-control, courage, en- 
durance, minds quick in emergencies, 
devotion to class and college, and who 
play to the grand stand, and unless they 
can be spectacular are of no use. 

I dwell on football because its hold on 
a college is often misunderstood by per- 
sons who think of it merely as a brutal, 
tricky, and sadly exaggerated pastime, 
and not, in spite of its evils, as a test of 
generalship, physical and moral prow- 
ess, quickness of body and mind ; and 
because it is a good illustration of a vis- 
ible and practical purpose (crossing the 
enemy's goal line) fired by an ideal (the 
honor and glory of a college). The full 
strength of college feeling does not come 
to a man until years after his gradua- 
tion ; but he knows something of it when 
he " lines up " beside his old school en- 
emy against an old school friend, who, 
at the parting of the ways, has chosen 



34 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

another Alma Mater. As years go by, 
his love of college becomes second only 
to his love of country. The college be- 
comes more and more a human being, 
for whom it is an honor to work, to live, 
and to die. Indeed, every man who has 
once taken her name is in some sense 
bound to work, to live, and to die for 
her. In business, in politics, in religion, 
in everything, it is she who cheers him, 
as he struggles to hold his standard 
high. Much modern teaching dwells on 
the development of self ; yet he who de- 
votes himself to the rounding out of his 
own powers may be good for nothing, 
whereas he who devotes himself to what 
he loves better than himself, and thus 
abandons much that looks good for him 
because he must do something else with 
his whole heart, — must do it often in a 
romantic and what may seem a reckless 
loyalty, — such a man achieves a power 
beyond the reach of the professional self- 
developer. Education is not in a high 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 35 

sense practical unless it has an ideal in 
it and round about it. I know the com- 
mon talk that colleges unfit their stu- 
dents for those daily duties which might 
chafe a j mind that has tasted intellectual 
joy. No college can make everybody 
unselfish and wise ; yet among human 
powers for unselfishness and wisdom I 
know none like that of a healthy college. 
If by a practical life we mean such a 
life of service as is not merely endured 
but enjoyed, lived with enthusiasm, then 
surely the most unpractical people in the 
world are the men and women who put 
away their ideals as childish things. 
" The light of a whole life dies 
When love is done," 

a poet says ; and though he means the 
love between man and woman, his verse 
would be more deeply true if "love" 
might take on the wider meaning of 
that faith and energy and courage and 
enthusiasm which light the dim and tor- 
tuous way. With this, no life while sense 



36 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

remains can be crushed by drudgery or 
woe. Without it, a life of drudgery is a 
life of Egyptian darkness. " Where there 
is no vision the people perish." 

The college helps her sons and daugh- 
ters to keep alive the vision. She dif- 
fuses about them what Mr. Justice 
Holmes has called "an aroma of high 
feeling, not to be found or lost in science 
or Greek, — not to be fixed, yet all-per- 
vading.' ' She shows, in steady bright- 
ness to the best, in flashing glimpses to 
the worst, the vision without which there 
is no life. She teaches her children not 
to shun drudgery but to do the work, 
and in doing it to know its higher end. 
The question whether a thing is ever- 
lasting truth or commonplace is often 
a question whether it has or has not a 
light in it. Homer, even when he tells 
us how Telemachus put on his clothes, 
is not commonplace. " I suppose," says 
Ruskin, " the passage in the Iliad which 
on the whole has excited most admira- 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 37 

tion is that which describes a wife's sor- 
row at parting from her husband, and a 
child's fright at its father's helmet." It 
is education that helps us see, as Homer 
saw, the high meaning of the common- 
place in every part of life, the beauty 
whereby the drudgery of daily life be- 
comes transfigured. It is education that 
teaches us not to measure the best things 
in the world by money. It is educated 
men and women, beyond all others, who 
throw into their work that eager sacri- 
fice of love for which no money can pay, 
and to which, when work cries out to 
be done, no task is too forbidding, no 
hours are too long. The practical life is 
the life of steady, persistent, intelligent, 
courageous work, widening its horizon 
as the worker grows in knowledge, and, 
by doing well what lies before him, fits 
himself for harder and higher tasks. But 
the practical life of educated men and 
women is, or should be, even more than 
this. It makes, or should make, every 



38 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

task the expression of an enlightened 
spirit. There were in the nineteenth 
century few lives more practical than 
those of the " heroic boys " who, in the 
exquisite words of their old comrade, 
"gave freely and eagerly all that they 
had or hoped for to their country and 
to their fellow-men in the hour of great 
need." In such a practical life as every 
man or woman ought to lead, such a 
practical life as educated men and wo- 
men are bound to lead or be false to 
their trust, it is the vision that abides 
and commands. 



HARVARD AND THE 
INDIVIDUAL 



HARVARD AND THE 
INDIVIDUAL 

For such intercollegiate discussion as 
takes the form of " symposia " in Sunday 
papers, the relative merit of large and 
small colleges is a never-failing topic; 
and in this discussion some officers of 
the smaller colleges maintain that a col- 
lege is the better for being small. With- 
out inquiring whether these gentlemen 
would reject opportunities of growth for 
their own colleges, whether the system 
of admission by certificate is not chiefly 
a bid for students, and whether the very 
pleas for the small college are not de- 
signed to make it larger, I pass at once 
to the strongest argument of the small 
college — the argument that in it every- 
body knows everybody else, and that 



42 HARVARD AND 

consequently, while the whole commu- 
nity may move as one man, the individ- 
ual is never ignored. In a large college, 
these gentlemen contend, concerted ac- 
tion is impossible ; and the individual 
with no strong social claim is lost in the 
crowd. Near a whole city full, home he 
has none. If he is poor, he may starve ; 
if he is morbid, he may go mad ; if he 
is sick, he may die — and no one of his 
fellows knows till all is over. If he is 
eccentric, he may be " queered," as it is 
called, growing queerer and queerer un- 
til an eccentricity which might be modi- 
fied into effective individuality has be- 
come a hopeless inability to get on with 
men. In a small college the student who 
would be a recluse is literally dragged 
out of his den to see football — or even 
to play it — and is humanized thereby. 
At a large college nobody need know 
or care whether any one sees a game of 
football or not. There are enough with- 
out him. If he chooses to " flock by 



THE INDIVIDUAL 43 

himself," he may do so till he is at cross 
purposes with his own youth and with 
every natural manifestation of youth in 
others. Yet the spirit that brings all the 
students of a college together for a com- 
mon purpose, the undivided enthusiasm 
of a whole college, is one of the precious 
experiences of education ; for even when 
to middle-aged people the cause seems 
trivial, the spirit is patriotism, the same 
patriotism that in a national crisis 
" Shall nerve heroic boys 
To hazard all in Freedom's fight." 

That even a large college may be 
roused as one man is obvious to any- 
body who has heard (I use the word ad- 
visedly) a game of baseball at Princeton, 
or who has known athletics at Yale, or 
who knew Harvard in the football sea- 
son of 1 90 1. Princeton, situated in a 
small town on an isolated hill, is a cen- 
tre to itself. Yale lived long in and 
about a crowded campus, and is so far 
from a great city that even on Saturdays 



44 HARVARD AND 

and Sundays the students naturally stay 
at the college. At Yale, moreover, as at 
Princeton, the elective system was for 
many years applied so sparingly that 
the students felt the sympathy which 
comes of common tasks; and even if 
now and then this union, like some 
others, was a union for the avoidance of 
labor, it could not but prove a strong 
bond. Harvard, on the contrary, seems 
at first sight to have every requisite for 
disintegration : she lives close to a large 
city, full of social distractions ; she has 
hundreds of students from Boston and 
the suburbs who may go and come 
every day ; her recitation halls, her labo- 
ratories, and even her dormitories are 
often far apart. Moreover her elective 
system is so free that even at the outset 
it breaks up the classes ; and not only 
Jones and Smith, but Jones and John- 
son, whose alphabetical destiny would 
seem to unite them, may go through 
four years without knowing each other 



THE INDIVIDUAL 45 

by sight or even being in the same lec- 
ture room at the same time. In such a 
university, it is urged, all common feel- 
ing must be factitious — " pumped," like 
that organized cheering when nobody is 
cheerful, but everybody is trying to 
"support" his team and "rattle" the 
other one. In organized cheering, it is 
urged, and in that only, Jones and John- 
son have a common emotional experi- 
ence, but they have it anonymously. 

A story told by Professor Palmer and 
afterward printed by Mr. E. S. Martin 
reveals the divided interests of Harvard. 
On the evening of a mass meeting in 
Massachusetts Hall for the discussion 
of some point in the athletic relations 
between Harvard and Yale, Professor 
Palmer went to Sever Hall, where Mr. 
David A. Wells was to lecture on bank- 
ing ; and as he went he was troubled by 
the thought that " those boys " would all 
be in Massachusetts Hall, and that Mr. 
Wells would have no audience. Arriving 



46 HARVARD AND 

at the lecture hall, which seats over four 
hundred persons, he found standing-room 
only ; and it was not Cambridge women 
that filled the seats — it was Harvard 
students. After the lecture, remember- 
ing that there should be that evening 
a meeting of the Classical Club, he went 
to the top of Stoughton Hall to find there 
between twenty and thirty men, who, 
oblivious alike of banking and of Yale, 
had spent the evening in a discussion of 
Homeric philology. " Harvard indiffer- 
ence," says one critic ; " Harvard Uni- 
versity," says another. Much of the 
strength of Harvard lies in her diversity 
of interests. Side by side with the boys 
whose passion is football are the men 
whose passion is mathematics or philo- 
sophy, who care nothing for intercolle- 
giate politics and less than nothing for 
intercollegiate athletics ; and such is the 
freedom of Harvard that these men are 
suffered to follow their own bent, and 
are not forced into a life with which they 



THE INDIVIDUAL 47 

have no sympathy. To one who has lived 
in Harvard College it is the college of all 
colleges for the recognition of individual 
needs and individual rights ; of the in- 
evitable and delightful variety in talent 
and temperament, and even in enthu- 
siasm. When all the people in one place 
are interested in one thing, it may be 
inspiration, and it may be provinciality. 
When everybody in a university shouts 
at every ball game, athletics prosper, but 
culture pines. Where Greek and the 
chapel are elective, baseball should not 
be prescribed ; and where baseball is not 
prescribed, there are sure to be individ- 
uals who cannot always occupy either 
the diamond or the bleachers. 

"We grant," it may be said, " that Har- 
vard allows and encourages a man to lead 
an independent intellectual life, to get all 
the Greek he wants, and all the chemis- 
try he wants — and no more ; but what 
of human fellowship, the real and great 
and permanent blessing of college life ? " 



48 HARVARD AND 

The answer of any one who knows the 
College is this : if a man is interested in 
anything outside of himself, he will get 
human fellowship in Cambridge ; if he 
is not, he will not get it anywhere. The 
best friendships, as divers wise men have 
told us, are based on common interest in 
work. Editors of a college paper, debat- 
ers in a college team, students working 
side by side in a laboratory — or even in 
athletics, now that athletics have ceased 
to be play — these men, and not the fel- 
low poker-players, are laying the founda- 
tion of permanent friendship. Harvard 
College contains hundreds of groups of 
men who come together for work which 
they do for the love of it ; and in some 
one of these an earnest man is sure to 
find or make his friends. Is it better to 
know everybody in a class of fifty or fifty 
in a class of five hundred ? Which offers 
the more reasonable and promising basis 
for the friendship of a life ? Is there not, 
after all, some danger when even afnni- 



THE INDIVIDUAL 49 

ties are, as it were, prescribed and pro- 
vincial — some danger in that extem- 
pore intimacy, that almost instantaneous 
swearing of eternal friendship, which a 
small community may demand ? 

" But what of the relation between stu- 
dent and instructor ? " In a small college 
the Faculty know, or think they know, 
every student. Between the large college 
and the small there is a real difference in 
the relation of the instructors as a whole 
toward the students as individuals, and 
in the relation of the students as a whole 
toward the instructors as individuals. In 
Harvard University are over three hun- 
dred professors, instructors, and assist- 
ants under the Faculty of Arts and Sci- 
ences alone, of whom more than a third 
are members of that Faculty appointed 
either for a term of years or without 
limit of time. No teacher knows by sight 
every other teacher ; still less does any 
teacher know every student. Yet many 
teachers know more students than they 



50 HARVARD AND 

would or could know in a small college ; 
and every student is known by several 
teachers besides his Freshman " adviser." 
Even the large lecture courses are so 
combined with laboratory work or con- 
ferences or excursions that the students 
in them are brought into contact with 
the younger teachers if not with the older 
ones. There is, I believe, no college in 
which the relation between instructor 
and pupil is more delightful. The ma- 
turer students are frequently consulted 
in matters of general importance and 
frequently called upon to help other stu- 
dents who need the strength that comes 
from strong friends. Many instructors 
invite students to their houses, or keep 
certain hours clear, as the University 
preachers do, for any and all students. 
Every Christmas Eve Professor Norton 
opens his fine old house at Shady Hill 
to all members of the University who are 
away from home. Some young men, it is 
said, stay away from home a day longer 



THE INDIVIDUAL 51 

to meet Professor Norton thus ; and their 
host would forgive them if he could know 
the charm of an evening with him. 

Within a few years the wives of cer- 
tain University officers have instituted 
a series of afternoon teas on Fridays 
between Thanksgiving and the first of 
March, and have invited all members 
of the University. The teas, on which 
students at first looked sceptically if not 
scornfully, are now fairly established. 
They have done much in giving new- 
comers what they sadly need — the so- 
ciety of refined women — and in giving 
all students opportunities of meeting 
persons whom it is a privilege to know. 
The room used for the teas is the large 
parlor of Phillips Brooks House ; the rug 
in the centre was Bishop Brooks's own ; 
and the bust in the adjoining hall, with 
the tablet beside it, leads men's thoughts 
to him for whom the house was named, 
and in whose honor it was dedicated to 
hospitality as well as to piety. 



52 HARVARD AND 

The homesick Freshman from a dis- 
tant State finds at Cambridge a better 
welcome than he expects, though no 
kindness can at once and forever anni- 
hilate homesickness. Some years ago a 
well-known professor, walking through 
the College Yard at the beginning of 
the autumn term, met a young man 
whose aspect prompted him to say : "Are 
you looking for anybody ? " The young 
man answered : " I don't know anybody 
this side of the Rocky Mountains." Of 
what immediately followed I know no- 
thing, but can guess much. Of one 
thing I am sure, — the young man is 
to-day a loyal graduate of Harvard 
College. Nowadays the newly arrived 
student finds waiting for him, even be- 
fore he meets his " adviser," a committee 
of instructors and undergraduates whose 
business and whose pleasure it is to help 
him adjust himself to his new surround- 
ings. Nor has he been long at the Uni- 
versity before he is invited to the room 



THE INDIVIDUAL 53 

of a Junior or a Senior, to meet there a 
few members of his own class, as well as 
members of other classes. There he and 
his classmates are entertained by the 
older men, who often give them serious 
and sensible advice ; and there they are 
made to feel that they are "taken into 
the team." "Entertained," I said, — not 
hazed, as of old ; and though the decline 
and fall of hazing may cut off Fresh- 
men from the instantaneous friendships 
of cooperative self-defence, few will re- 
gard it as a mark of degeneration. To at 
least one of these entertainments every 
Freshman is invited; for the large com- 
mittee of Seniors and Juniors in charge 
assigns each Freshman to some one man. 
Freshmen are invited, also, by their class 
president to social evening meetings, for 
which purpose, since scarcely any room 
can hold them all, the class is sometimes 
divided into squads of fifty or sixty. 
Again, in the new Harvard Union, 
which, like so much else, the University 



54 HARVARD AND 

owes to Mr. Henry L. Higginson, the 
newcomer finds countless opportunities 
of scraping acquaintance with his fel- 
lows. 

Probably the sick student is better and 
more promptly cared for at Harvard 
than at any other university in the world. 
Here, as elsewhere, a taciturn and cour- 
ageous person may bear much pain and 
disease without revealing his bodily 
state to a physician ; but nowhere is such 
conduct less necessary and less excusa- 
ble. Every student not well enough to 
attend College exercises need only send 
word to the Medical Visitor, who will 
come at once to his room and tell him 
what to do. If the case is simple, the 
Medical Visitor gives advice and, it may 
be, a prescription ; if it requires pro- 
longed medical attendance, he sends for 
any physician that the student may 
name. He himself keeps fixed office 
hours in the College Yard for consulta- 
tion with such students as need him ; nor 



THE INDIVIDUAL 55 

does he receive pay for any part of his 
work as Medical Visitor beyond his sal- 
ary from the University. The prompt- 
ness and the devotion of this officer 
reduce to a minimum the danger of con- 
tagion from epidemics. For the care of 
the sick, the Stillman Infirmary has al- 
ready a nearly perfect equipment; and 
the new ward for contagious diseases 
will make the Infirmary complete. 

As to moral aid for the individual stu- 
dents, no one who is not inside of Har- 
vard life can begin to know how many 
young fellows are aiding the weaker 
brethren to lead clean, sober, and hon- 
est lives ; how much responsibility of 
all sorts the best students will take, 
not merely for their personal friends but 
for anybody that they can help. Some 
years ago a young man of strange and 
forbidding character was seen running 
round and round on a Cambridge side- 
walk, imagining that he was Adam 
flying from temptation ; and though ob- 



$6 HARVARD AND 

viously insane he was put into the sta- 
tion-house. The case was made known 
to a student who as a child had attended 
the same school. He had never known 
the sick man much, and had never known 
good of him ; yet he got his release 
from the station-house, promising to be 
responsible for him through the night. 
With the aid of a fellow student he took 
into his own rooms the insane man, and 
gave him the bedroom. He himself with 
his friend sat up all night in the adjoin- 
ing study. Into this study the madman 
would issue from time to time, making 
night hideous to the two watchers ; but 
they did not lose patience. In the morn- 
ing the student in charge secured a phy- 
sician, assumed the responsibility of a 
guardian, drove with the sick man to 
the nearest asylum, advanced money (of 
which he was notoriously short) for ne- 
cessary expenses, and then, exhausted, 
hastened to New York to meet his fel- 
low members of the Hasty Pudding Club 



THE INDIVIDUAL 57 

(who had started, I believe, the night 
before) and appeared as a smiling star 
in the performance for which he had 
been so strangely prepared. No casual 
observer would have dreamed that in 
this apparently thoughtless person were 
the quick courage and devotion which 
made inevitable the acceptance of a 
revolting service for a youth who was 
almost an outcast. 

The University is a little world with 
all the varied enthusiasms of athletic, in- 
tellectual, social, and moral life ; and in 
spite of the temptation here as in other 
worlds, little or big, for men to break 
up into small and exclusive groups, the 
number of students who have with their 
fellows an acquaintance wide and varied 
is exceedingly large. Our wiser students 
recognize the truth of the late Lord 
Dundreary's famous proverb, "Birds of 
a feather gather no moss," and act ac- 
cordingly. Moreover there are few com- 
munities, if any, in which a man may 



58 HARVARD AND 

stand more firmly on what he himself is 
and does, trusting to be judged thereby. 
I doubt whether any student within my 
memory was ever more warmly admired 
and loved than Marshall Newell, a farmer 
boy. He was, it is true, an athlete, " an 
athlete sturdy, alert, and brave." Ath- 
letics made him widely known ; what 
made him widely loved was not athletics 
but the strong, healthy, simple, and fear- 
less heart which revealed itself in his 
athletics as in everything else about 
him ; and when he died one of the social 
leaders of his college days said sincerely 
that it was worth while to spend four 
years in Harvard College, merely to have 
known such a man as he. 

Not many years ago a big country 
boy named Adelbert Shaw entered Har- 
vard College as a special student. He 
had been fitting himself for Wesleyan 
University, and had changed his plans 
so suddenly that he could not take all 
the Harvard examinations for regular 



THE INDIVIDUAL 59 

standing. On his arrival he knew but 
one or two persons in the University. 
He had little capital besides a strong 
body and mind, an unmistakable good 
nature, a big earnestness, and an unu- 
sual aptitude for turning from one kind 
of work to another with equal devotion 
to each and no waste of power in the 
transition. On the football field he made 
people laugh by his awkwardness and 
by the beaming good humor with which 
he hurled himself into the scrimmage ; 
in the classroom he was as earnest as 
on the ball field ; in his own room, not- 
withstanding his sudden and universal 
popularity, he worked hard, and in study 
hours kept his door closed to all but the 
few that he knew best. He was not a 
great athlete, though he might have be- 
come one. He played in the Freshman 
football team, was a substitute in the 
University football squad, and later ap- 
peared as a candidate for the University 
crew. In the spring of his first year at 



60 HARVARD AND 

Cambridge, he was thrown out of a sin- 
gle shell and was drowned. His body 
was sent home ; but after it had gone, 
a service was held in Appleton Chapel, 
which contained that day more students 
than I have ever seen in it before or 
since. In Holden Chapel the athletes 
had a service of their own ; and the stu- 
dent who took charge of it could scarcely 
speak. Shaw was a religious man, ear- 
nest in religion as in all things ; yet he 
was never praised more highly than by 
a student who was known as a cynic. 
In a few months this unknown coun- 
try boy had won the respect and the 
affection of the College that some still 
call indifferent, undemocratic, an aristo- 
cracy of Boston society and New York 
wealth. 

If a youth makes no friends in Cam- 
bridge, it is stupendously his own fault. 
I do not say that it is impossible for 
a Harvard student to go off by him- 
self, dig a hole, lie down in it, and stay 



THE INDIVIDUAL 61 

there — as he might not be able to do at 
a small college ; I do say that those who 
affirm Harvard to be undemocratic or 
to value men for their money are either 
misinformed or defamatory. I could 
name plenty of men whom heaps of 
money did not save from social fail- 
ure in Harvard College ; and even more 
whom narrow means and want of fam- 
ily connection did not cut off from al- 
most universal popularity. Students at 
Harvard, like students elsewhere — like 
all men, young or old — may misjudge 
their fellows, and, misjudging them, may 
use them cruelly. Yet even in such cases 
most of the blame belongs commonly to 
the misjudged man. The student who 
bears himself well and does something for 
his class or his College is sure eventually 
to succeed. In the Freshman year a few 
prizes may be given to attractive loaf- 
ers; but in the long run the Harvard 
public insists on some form of achieve- 
ment. No individual who does anything 



62 HARVARD 

worth doing, and does it with all his 
might, need be lost in the crowd at Har- 
vard ; and, taken for all in all, Harvard 
is the best place I know for the indi- 
vidual youth. 



ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 



ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD, MAS- 
SACHUSETTS, ON THE ONE 
HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY 
OF THE BIRTH OF EMERSON, 
MAY 25, 1903. 

Now and then we meet a man who seems 
to live high above the little things that 
vex our lives, and who makes us forget 
them. He may speak or he may be si- 
lent ; it is enough that he lives and that 
we are with him. When we face him, we 
feel somewhat as we feel when we first 
see the ocean, or Niagara, or the Alps, 
or Athens, or when we first read the 
greatest poetry. Nothing, indeed, is more 
like great poetry than the soul of a great 
man ; and when the great man is good, 
when he loves everything that is beauti- 
ful and true and makes his life like what 



66 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

he loves, his face becomes transfigured, 
or, as an old poet used to say, " through- 
shine;" for the soul within him is the 
light of the world. 

Such a great man was Emerson. He 
was much beside : he was a philosopher. 
Sometimes a philosopher is a man who 
disbelieves everything worth believing, 
and spends a great deal of strength in 
making simple things hard ; but Emer- 
son was a philosopher in the best sense 
of the word, — a lover of wisdom and of 
truth. He was also a poet ; not a poet 
like Homer who sang, but a poet like 
that Greek philosopher, Plato, who 
thought deep and high, and saw what 
no one else saw, and told what he saw 
as no one else could tell it. This is an- 
other way of saying that Emerson was 
a " seer." 

To many of you he may not seem a 
poet, for his verse is often homely and 
rough. It has lines and stanzas of noble 
music, — 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 67 

" Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old." 

" Still on the seeds of all he made 
The rose of beauty burns. 
Through times that wear and forms that fade 
Immortal youth returns ; " 

but seldom many of them in succession. 

" Though love repine and reason chafe, 

There came a voice without reply, — 
' 'T is man's perdition to be safe, 

When for the truth he ought to die.' " 

The first three of these lines are beyond 
the reach of most poets ; the fourth line 
is prose. 

" I am born a poet," he wrote to his 
betrothed ; " of a low class without doubt, 
yet a poet. That is my nature and voca- 
tion. My singing, be sure, is very husky, 
and is, for the most part, in prose." " He 
lamented his hard fate," says his bio- 
grapher, Mr. Cabot, " in being only half 
a bard ; or, as he wrote to Carlyle, ' not a 
poet, but a lover of poetry and poets, 
and merely serving as writer, etc., in 



68 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

this empty America before the arrival of 
the poets.' " He questioned whether to 
print his poems, " uncertain always," he 
wrote, " whether I have one true spark 
of that fire which burns in verse ; " and 
in a little poem, called "The Test," he 
says that in some five hundred of his 
verses 



When he wrote prose, he thought of a 
sentence by itself, and not of its connec- 
tion with other sentences ; and when he 
wrote verse, he thought, it would seem, 
of the form of each line, without much 
attention to the form or the length of its 
neighbors, or even to its own smooth- 
ness, — he whose ear for a prose sentence 
was trained so delicately. 

Yet I, for one, would give up any other 
poetry of America rather than Emer- 
son's ; and I am certain that one secret 
of his power over men and women was 
his belief that every human soul is poetry 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 69 

and a poet, and his waking of men and 
women to that belief. He had beyond 
other men a poet's heart ; and if, as Car- 
lyle says, to see deeply is to see music- 
ally, and poetry is musical thought, he 
is a poet of poets. 

" God hid the whole world in thy heart," 

says Emerson. " The poet," he says else- 
where, " knows why the plain or meadow 
of space was strown with these flowers 
we call suns, and moons, and stars ; why 
the great deep is adorned with animals, 
with men and gods." 

Nature he lived with ; and when he 
wrote of her, he wrote as one who knew 
her as his closest friend. "My book 
should smell of pines," he said. 

" To read the sense the woods impart 
You must bring the throbbing heart." 

" Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy, 
And merry is only a mask of sad, 
But, sober on a fund of joy, 
The woods at heart are glad." 



;o ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

" Hast thou named all the birds without a gun ? 
Loved the wood-rose and left it on its stalk ? 

O be my friend, and teach me to be thine." 

"Thou" [the poet], he said, "shalt 
have the whole land for thy park and 
manor, the sea for thy bath and naviga- 
tion, without tax and without envy ; the 
woods and the rivers thou shalt own ; 
and thou shalt possess that wherein oth- 
ers are only tenants and boarders. Thou 
true land-lord ! sea-lord ! air-lord ! Wher- 
ever snow falls, or water flows, or birds 
fly, wherever day and night meet in twi- 
light, wherever the blue heaven is hung 
by clouds or sown with stars, wherever 
are forms with transparent boundaries, 
wherever are outlets into celestial space, 
wherever is danger and awe and love, 
there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed 
for thee ; and though thou shouldst walk 
the world over, thou shalt not be able 
to find a condition inopportune or ig- 
noble." 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 71 

The poet is not only a seer, he is a 
hearer : — 

" Let me go where'er I will 
I hear a sky-born music still : 
It sounds from all things old, 
It sounds from all things young, 
From all that 's fair, from all that 's foul, 
Peals out a cheerful song. 
It is not only in the rose, 
It is not only in the bird, 
Not only where the rainbow glows, 
Nor in the song of woman heard, 
But in the darkest, meanest things 
There alway, alway something sings. 
'T is not in the high stars alone, 
Nor in the cups of budding flowers, 
Nor in the red-breast's mellow tone, 
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, 
But in the mud and scum of things 
There alway, alway something sings." 

Yet it was not cheerfulness that made 
Emerson a poet ; and certainly it was not 
music, in the common understanding of 
the term: it was high thought, joined 
with a wonderful gift — an almost in- 
spired sense — of the right word ; a gift 



72 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

not always his, but his so often that he 

has said more memorable things than 

any other American. You can find no 

higher simplicity in the fitting of word to 

thought : — 

" Though love repine and reason chafe, 
There came a voice without reply." 

While I speak of the poetry in him 
and the love of nature, let me read what 
he wrote to a little girl of thirteen who 
looked up to him then and always : — 

My dear Lucia : — I am afraid you 
think me very ungrateful for the good 
letters which I begged for and which 
are so long in coming to me, or that I 
am malicious and mean to make you 
wait as long for an answer ; but, to tell 
you the truth, I have had so many " com- 
position lessons " set me lately, that I am 
sure that no scholar of Mr. Moore's has 
had less spare time. Otherwise I should 
have written instantly ; for I have an im- 
mense curiosity for Plymouth news, and 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 73 

have a great regard for my young cor- 
respondent. I would gladly know what 
books Lucia likes to read when nobody 
advises her, and most of all what her 
thoughts are when she walks alone or sits 
alone. For, though I know that Lucia is 
the happiest of girls in having in her sis- 
ter so wise and kind a guide, yet even 
her aid must stop when she has put the 
book before you : neither sister nor bro- 
ther nor mother nor father can think for 
us : in the little private chapel of your 
own mind none but God and you can 
see the happy thoughts that follow each 
other, the beautiful affections that spring 
there, the little silent hymns that are sung 
there at morning and at evening. And I 
hope that every sun that shines, every star 
that rises, every wind that blows upon 
you will only bring you better thoughts 
and sweeter music. Have you found out 
that Nature is always talking to you, es- 
pecially when you are alone, though she 
has not the gift of articulate speech? 



74 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

Have you found out what that great gray- 
old ocean that is always in your sight 
says ? Listen. And what the withered 
leaves that shiver and chatter in the cold 
March wind ? Only listen. The Wind is 
the poet of the World, and sometimes 
he sings very pretty summer ballads, and 
sometimes very terrible odes and dirges. 
But if you will not tell me the little soli- 
tary thoughts that I am asking for, what 
Nature says to you, and what you say to 
Nature, at least you can tell me about 
your books, — what you like the least and 
what the best, . . . the new studies, . . . 
the drawing and the music and the 
dancing, — and fail not to write to your 
friend, 

R. Waldo Emerson. 

His " immense curiosity for Plymouth 
news" is not surprising; for he wrote 
this letter shortly before his marriage 
with Miss Jackson, of Plymouth. The 
" wise and kind " sister of his little cor- 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 75 

respondent was Miss Jackson's closest 
friend, and stood up with her at the 
wedding. 

Emerson was also a patriot, a man 
who loved his country, and longed for it 
to do right. " One thing," he says, " is 
plain for all men of common sense and 
common conscience, that here, here in 
America is the home of man." " America 
is a poem in our eyes ; " "its ample 
geography dazzles the imagination, and 
it will not wait long for metres." 

" For He that flung the broad blue fold 
O'ermantling land and sea, 
One third part of the sky unrolled 
For the banner of the free." 

" For He that worketh high and wise 
Nor pauses in his plan, 
Will take the sun out of the skies 
Ere freedom out of man." 

Yet his greatest patriotic poem is not 
the Fourth of July Ode, from which I 
have been quoting, — 

(" O tenderly the haughty day 
Fills his blue urn with fire,") 



76 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

and not the " Concord Hymn," never so 
familiar that we can read without a 
thrill, — 

" Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the world ; " 

his greatest patriotic poem is " Volun- 
taries," which treats of slavery and the 
conflict between North and South. Free- 
dom loves the North : — 

" The snowflake is her hi 
Her stripes the boreal streamers are." 

It is this poem that answers the terrible 
question, — 

" Who shall nerve heroic boys 
To hazard all in Freedom's fight ? " 

with that mighty quatrain, — 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, * Thou must,' 
The youth replies, ' I can.' " 

Yet Emerson is greatest, not as philo- 
sopher, poet, or patriot, but as helper of 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 77 

men. He made men better by simply- 
walking among them. I have spoken of 
his face as a through-shine/' as transfig- 
ured with love and refinement and wis- 
dom, with the vision that shall not fade, — 

" And never poor beseeching glance 
Shamed that sculptured countenance." 

It is much to remember him as I do, even 
in his old age ; to have lived with those 
to whom he was " Mr. Emerson," who 
had known him early, and who loved him 
as they loved no other man. Some of 
you may secretly wonder whether he was 
all that your elders have called him, just 
as I used to wonder whether the Par- 
thenon, the great temple at Athens, was 
not Professor Norton's building rather 
than mine, whether it would appeal to 
such as I. When I saw the Parthenon, 
even in its ruin, I accepted it instantly 
and forever ; and if you could have seen 
Emerson, even in his enfeebled old age, 
you would have accepted him. 



78 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

" No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace 
As I have seen in one autumnal face." 

Emerson's face was the highest and the 
loveliest and the most " through-shine," 
because his life was all this. "Is it so 
bad?" he wrote to a friend who had said 
that " no one would dare to uncover the 
thoughts of a single hour," — " Is it so 
bad ? I own that to a witness worse than 
myself and less intelligent I should not 
willingly put a window into my breast. 
But to a witness more intelligent and vir- 
tuous than I, or to one precisely as in- 
telligent and well intentioned, I have no 
objection to uncover my heart." " He 
was right," says Mr. Cabot, "he could 
only have gained by it." " It was good," 
says Hawthorne in a passage that Mr. 
Cabot quotes, " to meet him in the wood- 
paths or sometimes in our avenue with 
that pure intellectual gleam diffusing 
about his presence like the garment of a 
shining one ; and he, so quiet, so simple, 
so without pretension, encountering each 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 79 

man alive as if expecting to receive more 
than he would impart. It was impossible 
to dwell in his vicinity without inhaling 
more or less the mountain atmosphere 
of his lofty thought." 

Emerson himself has told us that 
" Rectitude scatters favors on every side 
without knowing it, and receives with 
wonder the thanks of all people." So it 
was with him; as it is written of one 
whom no man was more like, "There 
went virtue out of him and healed them 
all." He who knew sorrow yet was glad, 
who knew self-distrust yet stood self-reli- 
ant, who knew weakness yet remained 
strong, who knew bitterness yet kept 
sweet, whose love of man and of nature 
and of nature in man, shone through his 
face, and through every page he wrote, 
— he seemed to those near him the very 
prophet of God, preaching hope, free- 
dom, courage, the glory of a high and 
simple life. "The sublime vision," he 
says, " comes to the pure and simple soul 



8o ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

in a clean and chaste body." " If we live 
truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for 
the strong man to be strong as it is for 
the weak to be weak." 

" Teach me your mood, O patient stars ! 
Who climb each night the ancient sky, 
Leaving on space no shade, no scars, 
No trace of age, no fear to die." 

In his presence weak men were ashamed 
that they had ever wondered whether it 
was worth while to live ; for in his pre- 
sence, even in the presence of what he 
had written, it was harder to be a coward 
than to be brave. 

Of young people — not children, but 
young men and women — he was the 
supreme helper ; and we must remember 
that it was not only neighbors and friends 
who loved him, not only those that 
touched the hem of his garment who 
were made whole. His voice, his manner, 
his presence, charmed and refined all who 
came near him ; but his written words put 
courage into ten thousand hearts. 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 81 

"Trust thyself; every heart vibrates 
to that iron string." 

" We will walk on our own feet ; we 
will work with our own hands ; we will 
speak our own minds." 

" If the single man plant himself in- 
domitably on his instincts and there 
abide, the huge world will come round 
to him." 

" We are parlor soldiers. We shun the 
rugged battle of fate where strength is 
born." 

"But we sit and weep in vain. The 
voice of the Almighty saith, ' Up and 
onward forever more ! ' " 

" Man is timid and apologetic ; he is 
no longer upright ; he dares not say, ' I 
think,' ' I am/ but quotes some saint or 
sage. He is ashamed before the blade of 
grass or the blowing rose. These roses 
under my window make no reference to 
former roses or to better ones ; they are 
for what they are ; they exist with God 
to-day." 



82 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

" I call upon you, young men, to obey 
your heart and be the nobility of this 
land." 

Here is the star to which many an awk- 
ward and timid country lad has hitched 
his wagon ; the strong and steady light 
to which the lights that flickered in a 
thousand hearts have flashed their brav- 
est answer. This gentle scholar was a 
man, and a man who inspired others 
with his own manliness. There was in 
his philosophy no room for the weak and 
lazy. With all his visions he had a keen 
sense of the value of time, and expressed 
it (with more truth than poetry) in " The 
Visit : " — 

" Askest, ' How long thou shalt stay ? 
Devastator of the day ! " 

" Do your work," he says, " and I shall 
know you. Do your work and you shall 
reinforce yourself. Do that which is as- 
signed you, and you cannot hope too 
much or dare too much." 

" The distinction and end of a soundly 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 83 

constituted man is his labor. Use is in- 
scribed on all his faculties. Use is the 
end to which he exists. As the tree ex- 
ists for its fruit, so a man for his work. 
A fruitless plant, an idle animal, does not 
stand in the universe.' ' 

He believed in work that left no time 
for worrying : — 

" But blest is he who playing deep yet haply asks 
not why, 
Too busied with the crowded hour to fear to live 
or die." 

And he believed in work through every- 
thing, — 

"On bravely through the sunshine and the 
showers ! 
Time hath his work to do and we have ours." 

Such was the courage of his preaching 
and of his life. We are to be ourselves 
in the present, not to make ourselves like 
anybody else or like what we ourselves 
have been. If we are inconsistent, no 
matter ; if we are misunderstood, no 
matter. " With consistency," he says, " a 



84 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

great soul has simply nothing to do. He 
may as well concern himself with his 
shadow on the wall. Speak what you 
think now in hard words, and to-morrow 
speak what to-morrow thinks in hard 
words again, though it contradict every- 
thing you said to-day. * Ah, so you shall 
be sure to be misunderstood ! ' Is it so 
bad, then, to be misunderstood? . . . 
Every pure and wise spirit that ever 
took flesh " has been misunderstood. 

" Whenever a mind is simple and re- 
ceives a divine wisdom, old things pass 
away, — means, teachers, texts, temples 
fall ; it lives now, and absorbs past and 
future into the present hour." 

" Our helm is given up to a better 
guidance than our own ; the course of 
events is quite too strong for any helms- 
man, and our little wherry is taken in 
tow by the ship of the great Admiral, 
which knows the way, and has the force 
to draw men and states and planets to 
their good." 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 85 

And there was no room in his philo- 
sophy for the sickly and discontented. 
As one of "the first obvious rules of 
life," he says, " Get health." " And the 
best part of health," he adds, " is fine dis- 
position. It is more essential than talent, 
even in the works of talent. Nothing will 
supply the want of sunshine to peaches, 
and to make knowledge valuable, you 
must have the cheerfulness of wisdom." 

" I know how easy it is to men of the 
world to look grave, and sneer at your 
sanguine youth and its glittering dreams. 
But I find the gayest castles in the air 
that were ever piled far better for com- 
fort and for use than the dungeons in 
the air that are daily dug and caverned 
out by grumbling, discontented people." 

Nor is cheerfulness for the young 
only : — 

" Spring still makes spring in the mind 
When sixty years are told ; 
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart 
And we are never old. 



86 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

Over the winter glaciers 

I see the summer glow, 

And through the wild-piled snow-drift 

The warm rosebuds below." 

Even though old age bring loss of power, 
it need not bring loss of cheerfulness : — 

" As the bird trims her to the gale, 
I trim myself to the storm of time ; 
I man the rudder, reef the sail, 
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime, 

1 Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
Right onward drive unharmed ; 
The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
And every wave is charmed.' " 

If disaster come, there is good in it. 
"We learn geology the morning after the 
earthquakec" 

George Eliot tells us of a woman who 
seemed among other people like a fine 
quotation from the Bible in a paragraph 
of a newspaper. Something like this 
might be said of Emerson, who brought 
into everyday life the help that cometh 
from the hills. " I believe," says an old 
friend of his, " no man ever had so deep 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 87 

an influence as he had on the life and 
thought of the young people of his day. 
I think there are many who would say 
. . . that it has been one of the chief 
privileges of their life to have lived at 
the same time with him." 

I have tried to show you what Emer- 
son has meant to American youth ; how 
he has stood for pure life, high thought, 
brave speech, patient and cheerful work ; 
how he found in everything poetry and 
a man's poetry, and revealed that poetry 
to the world : but this is not all. It is as 
easy to " put a girdle round about the 
earth in forty minutes " as to compass 
in half an hour a great man. I might 
speak of him as a forerunner of Darwin. 
"Man," he says, "is no upstart in the 
creation, but has been prophesied in 
nature for a thousand, thousand ages 
before he appeared. . . . His limbs are 
only a more exquisite organization — say 
rather the finish — of the rudimental 



88 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 

forms that have been already sweeping 
the sea and creeping in the mud ; the 
brother of his hand is even now cleaving 
the Arctic sea in the fin of the whale, 
and innumerable ages since was pawing 
the marsh in the flipper of the saurian/ ' 
I might speak of his Yankee humor, or 
of his tenderness and romance, — 
" The little Shakspeare in the maiden's heart 
Makes Romeo of a ploughboy on his cart ; " 

but I purposely let them pass with this 
bare mention (as I let pass " The Tit- 
mouse," "The Rhodora," "The Moun- 
tain and the Squirrel," "The Humble- 
bee ") ; for I wish you this day to think 
of Emerson, living and dead, as a high 
and helpful friend. There is no better 
company, no better society, than his. 
Read him and re-read him. Do not try 
to write like him : he would have you 
write like none but yourselves ; and be- 
sides, his style is his and his only. Do 
not try to be like him, except so far as in 
being your best selves you come into 



CHILDREN OF CONCORD 89 

the likeness of all who are good and 
true. When you read him, do not be 
troubled if you lose the thread of his 
thought ; he himself did that ; yet, as a 
young man once said of him, " His say- 
ings are like the stars, which are scat- 
tered disorderly but together make a 
firmament of light." 

"Hundreds of people," says Ruskin, 
"can talk for one who can think; but 
thousands can think for one who can see. 
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and 
religion all in one." 

This man who walked your streets, and 
loved them, spoke with a voice that is 
rare in any race or time ; he thought as 
it is given to few to think ; and he saw. 
We have had no man like him. I will 
not say that we have had none so great. 
Lincoln may have been greater. They 
are so different that we cannot compare 
the two ; and yet, as Lincoln's procla- 
mation brought life and hope to cap- 
tive hearts, so did the brave word that 



9 o TO THE SCHOOL CHILDREN 

Emerson spoke flash on the souls of men 
the truth that they were slaves no more ; 
that each might and must stand to his 
work erect and strong, since nature and 
God were his very own. The eyes of the 
blind were opened, and the ears of the 
deaf unstopped ; "for he came that they 
might have life, and that they might have 
it more abundantly." 



COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 



COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT 
WELLESLEY COLLEGE 

The last weeks of a Senior resemble in 
one respect the first weeks of a Fresh- 
man : they are too complexly active, too 
bewildering, for thought. Professors, ex- 
aminations, literary work, friendships, 
relatives, sweethearts, and plans of life 
whirl through a Senior's head and set 
it whirling with them. Then, as always, 
after exaltation comes depression. Clear- 
ing up after anything is a searching test 
of cheerfulness ; and clearing up after 
four of the richest years that youth 
can know, sending away your furni- 
ture from the room you love, bidding 
good-by to scores of fellow students 
whose lives have been very near your 
own, and doing it all with the reaction- 



94 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

ary weariness that follows prolonged 
excitement, is sad business, even for a 
sound-minded girl who is eager to do 
her part in a newly opening world. On 
the morning after Class Day in Cam- 
bridge, some years ago, an uncommonly 
healthy Senior who had played in the 
University football team and who could 
not be charged with maudlin sentiment, 
got up at five, sat on the steps of Uni- 
versity Hall in the middle of the College 
Yard, and wept. Before he went away, 
he said, he must have the Yard for once 
to himself : — 

" ' T were profanation of our joys 
To tell the laity our love." 

In this reaction, when you have shuf- 
fled off the coil of your last college days 
and find yourself face to face with a new 
life or with the return to an old one, you 
are prone to ask, " What has it all been 
for ? Am I fitter for the life I must live 
than if I had been living it four years 
already ? College has been fascinating, 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 95 

no doubt ; but many fascinating things 
do not pay. I have opened several doors 
to knowledge, and have learned that, 
work as hard and as long as I may, I 
can never see the thousandth part of 
that to which a single one of them may 
lead ; I have formed friendships that will 
last ; I have won something with which 
I would not part for money and without 
which I can no more imagine myself 
than I can conceive myself annihilated. 
These college years have become an in- 
extricable part of me ; yet am I, after 
all, happier and better than if I had 
never tasted their sweetness — had never 
caught glimpses of ideals that in every- 
day life may be my rebuke and my de- 
spair ?" In a small degree you feel as 
men and women feel when they wake to 
the truth that their elders have moved 
on; that they themselves are now the 
older generation to whom the younger 
turns for counsel ; that other people will 
lean on them, and that the days when 



96 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

they may lean on other people are gone 
and gone forever. 

When we say "What is it for?" let 
us first take care to recognize, as college 
people should, many things for which a 
life is worth living besides what is com- 
monly called practical. Lowell reminds 
us that the question "What is it good 
for?" "would abolish the rose and be 
answered triumphantly by the cabbage." 
"The danger of the prosaic type of 
mind," he adds, " lies in the stolid sense 
of superiority which blinds it to every- 
thing ideal, to the use of anything that 
does not serve the practical purposes 
of life." Now a man whose scheme of 
life is a cabbage scheme, who can go 
through college with no glimpse of the 
vision without which all is dark and 
dead, is too abnormal for our purposes 
to-day : and if this is true of a man, it is 
truer of a woman ; for in every part of 
life women take more kindly to the ideal. 
Yet if a college graduate tries to earn a 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 9; 

living by raising cabbages, or by keep- 
ing hens, or by any other unimaginative 
occupation, I believe (so deep is my 
faith in college training) that he or she 
will make up, even in such a prosaic 
field, for the years that might seem lost. 
"They jump farthest," says Ben Jonson, 
* * that fetch their race largest. ' ' President 
Hyde has pointed out that the apparent 
delaying of a life work by the years at 
college is like the stopping of a stream 
by a dam to give it accumulated power. 
He speaks of men ; but what he says 
applies to women also. Those persons 
who disparage a college education for 
men point to the self-made men of busi- 
ness who have climbed high : but of 
these self-made men the best openly ex- 
press as the great regret of their lives 
their want of a college education ; and 
of the worst, many, I suspect, grieve in 
their heart of hearts for the education 
they decry. They think perhaps of so- 
cial advantage, of culture, of knowledge ; 



98 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

they might well think also of the grasp 
of a trained mind and of the wisdom 
that should come with a wider outlook. 
Those who disparage a college educa- 
tion for women go further and wound 
deeper. "Toa woman," they say, " such 
an education is a social ^advantage ; 
for it spoils her. The ideal of manhood 
is one thing, that of womanhood another. 
Learning and the learned professions 
are for men; public life is for men. It 
remains for women to make themselves 
charming through their accomplishments 
and to live in their affections. A mascu- 
line woman is as bad as an effeminate 
man ; and a pedantic woman is worse 
than either. Moreover, studying mars 
beauty, for which every woman longs, 
whether she admits it or not, and to 
which every man, whatever he may say, 
pays gratifying homage." All this has 
been said so often that I hesitate to re- 
peat it ; yet, however familiar it is, and 
however false it may be, it raises a ques- 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 99 

tion that is vital. "In college study," 
said a great man, "it seems conclu- 
sively proved that women can do all 
that men can do — we do not yet know 
at what sacrifice." Is there necessarily a 
sacrifice ? 

First, as to pedantry. No doubt we 
have all seen young women in whom 
college education developed a pedantry 
to which they were predisposed ; and 
we have seen just such young men. Yet 
among the agents for knocking ped- 
antry out of young people I should count 
college life. In college if we appear 
pedantic, our friends contrive to tell us 
so in ways hard to forget ; and besides, 
the more we know, the more we know 
we don't know. Just as the study of 
Anglo-Saxon is the best remedy for mis- 
taken purism, so in every part of learn- 
ing, one good look at the mountains of 
knowledge, however far away, shows us 
pedantry and dogmatism as the miser- 
able little molehills that they really are. 



.LofC. 



ioo COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

After all, learning is no necessary part of 
the equipment of a pedant. Mr. Casau- 
bon was no more a pedant than Mr. 
Micawber, nor Anna Comnena than Mrs. 
Malaprop. Nor are masculine women 
commoner in college than out of it ; there 
is no sex in learning and nothing un- 
gentle. Nor does college study, mingled 
with the out-of-door life in a place like 
this, hurt either complexion or constitu- 
tion so much as parties and theatre- 
going. I doubt whether any one of you 
has ever lived or will ever live a healthier 
life than she has lived here, or a life of 
higher and more womanly ideals. One 
girl means to be a teacher ; another, 
though not a teacher or anything with 
a distinct name, means to be an alert, 
intelligent, helpful member of society. 
Each comes to college that, working and 
playing with other girls both like and un- 
like herself, she may look wider and 
deeper over and into human life, — not 
that she may be less womanly, but 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 101 

that she may be more of a woman. 
If now and then the love of learning 
and the discovery of scholarly talent 
lead a girl to give up all thought of 
a domestic life, it is not pedantry or 
masculinity ; it is rather the deliberate 
dedication of her strength to what she 
believes to be its fitting service. " I shall 
never forget," said a college boy, " the 
way Professor X talked of ethics — as if 
ethics were his daughter." This is the 
way some women feel about learning, or 
philanthropy, or any other great cause 
to which they give their lives ; and who 
shall say that they are wrong ? 

The one serious danger which I can 
see in a college education for women is 
the danger of intellectual unrest, of chaf- 
ing, in the daily duties of later life, at the 
meagreness of intellectual opportunity. 
A man, even by those who regard his 
college life as an essential social experi- 
ence to be achieved with the least possi- 
ble study, is expected on leaving college 



102 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

to get work at once. A woman is ex- 
pected to get it if there is nobody to 
support her : otherwise she may go home 
and may find between her college life 
and the home life that she reenters a 
perilous gap. Suppose she goes out into 
what is called society. After four years 
of steady employment, of constant, stim- 
ulating friendship, of high intellectual 
privilege, and of rapid growth in taste 
and knowledge, how mean and weari- 
some and inexcusable seems the round 
of parties and calls, how cheap much of 
what she used to regard as intellectual ! 
She may have to live in a town where 
the leading thinkers discuss the attri- 
butes of " the pagan god Ze-us " and find 
the highest achievement of literature in 
the chariot race from " Ben Hur." How 
shall she adjust herself to such a life as 
this ? how live in it with modest strength ? 
Or suppose her parents are country peo- 
ple and she goes home to help her 
mother. Disgusted with herself as she 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 103 

may be at the discovery, she may find 
that her family, though no less lovable 
than of old, are, for steady company, less 
interesting. As President Eliot says of 
university football players after a great 
contest, "the return to normal life is 
difficult;" or — to cite and adapt the 
words of another man — " She has looked 
her last upon the world of art and lit- 
erature and intellectual delight, within 
whose borders she has been permitted 
to dwell for four years, tasting of the 
pleasures that are not her birthright." 

Or suppose a girl teaches school and 
finds herself in a remote town where she 
is sandwiched between crude children 
on one side and a half-educated superin- 
tendent and several illiterate committee 
men on the other — a town whose soci- 
ety is undermined by gossip and whose 
school system is honeycombed with poli- 
tics. Is this the promised joy of the in- 
tellectual life ? Or suppose she sees the 
need of trained women in stenography, 



104 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

the quick accuracy of hand and brain 
which it demands, the intimate know- 
ledge of business which it develops, the 
posts of responsibility to which it may 
lead. In her new enthusiasm she begins 
work at a business school. She finds 
there few fellow students whose ideals 
and tastes are hers ; but she is there for 
work, not for companionship, and she 
keeps on. At last, unless she has excep- 
tional fortune or uses exceptional care, 
she may find that, in a business office, 
with a beginner's pay, with long hours 
and short vacations, she has much to 
bear from men who, whether they pass 
for gentlemen or not, are not gentlemen 
to her. How can she, with the refinement 
and the love of leadership which her 
intellectual life has fostered, endure a 
drudging inferiority to men whom she 
knows herself to be immeasurably above ? 
A man must submit to it in the begin- 
ning; but a man is of coarser fibre. 
Besides, a man knows that hard and able 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 105 

work will bring a man's reward ; whereas 
a woman knows that, partly because 
people are prejudiced but chiefly be- 
cause men and women are eternally un- 
like, she cannot hope for those positions 
which demand continuity of physical 
strength, grasp (not merely insight) in 
meeting large problems day after day, 
and unprotected association with all 
kinds of people. Women who can fill 
such positions are so few that we may 
pass them by. As the power, not on the 
throne but behind it, as the leaven that 
lifts men to higher things, as the stand- 
ard of unselfishness, devotion, purity, 
and faith, women may at some time re- 
form and transform the business world : 
but they will not often be good heads 
of business houses ; they may be good 
physicians, but they will rarely be good 
lawyers ; they may be, and often are, 
mentally and morally head and shoul- 
ders above the preachers to whom they 
listen with steady loyalty, but they will 



io6 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

be better ministers' wives than minis- 
ters. 

Or suppose a girl marries and keeps 
house. With the constant thought for 
her husband and children, with the con- 
stant details of a housekeeper's routine, 
how shall she feed her mind ? Possibly 
her husband, in a dark little office all 
day, cannot feed his ; but he is a man, and 
cares less. " Was all my training, then," 
she cries, " a training for servitude? " 

How long it takes us to learn that " the 
word of God is not bound ; " that what 
is enslaved in us is not the soul, which 
is our birthright, but a changeling that 
while we slept has stolen into its place ; 
and that what enslaves is not the routine 
of life but the chafing at the routine ! 
how long it takes us to see that every 
life without a light in it is dull, that no 
life with a light in it can be dull, and that 
whether the light is there or not is a 
matter of our own will ! As we see deeper 
and deeper into the complex sorrow of 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 107 

the world about us, we cannot be gay 
of heart, but we may and we should be 
happy ; and in hard work lighted by 
hope and courage and love we may learn 
that the constancy of routine is the con- 
stancy of a friend. Life is sure to be 
complicated, and it may be sad : but to 
a right-minded man or woman there is 
one thing it can never be — it can never 
be uninteresting ; and there is one thing 
it must always be — it must always be 
active. Moreover, in this activity every 
particle of learning or of training or of 
mere social experience that your college 
has given you is bound to tell. If what- 
ever you do is not done more intelli- 
gently and more earnestly for your col- 
lege education, the trouble is not in the 
college education but in you : you are 
the wrong kind of girl. 

If you have to earn a living and begin 
at the bottom, make the bottom stronger 
because you are there. Then trust to 
time. So few workers in proportion to 



108 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

the whole number give themselves in- 
telligently, loyally, and unreservedly to 
their immediate duty that if you thus give 
yourself you cannot but succeed. Thou- 
sands of people in small positions whine 
because their talents are thrown away — 
because their ability has no elbow-room. 
It is not elbow-room that they need ; it 
is " elbow - grease ; " it is energy and 
strength. Their very whining shows that 
they are too small for the places they are 
in now. When the right kind of person 
has too small a place, he does his work 
so well as to make the place bigger ; 
people see in it more than they ever saw 
before. He who laments that an unap- 
preciative world has slighted his talents 
is a more wicked and slothful servant 
than he who hides his one talent in a 
napkin. Do your work and you will 
succeed. Your idea of success may be 
different from what it would be if you 
had not come to college. I should be 
sorry if it were not ; for these four years 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 109 

have brought you possessions which will 
transform your whole life. 

Among these possessions is college 
loyalty. We sometimes forget that from 
the moment of our entering a college we 
have become a part of it, and it has be- 
come a part of us, inevitably and forever. 
We owe it money perhaps ; allegiance 
certainly and always. It is for us to keep 
our Alma Mater honored and wise and 
young. " We are all better Harvard men 
now," said the president of the Harvard 
Club of Chicago, "than when we were 
in college ; " and he was right. Much 
as you love Wellesley to-day, your love 
of her will deepen with the years and 
will take on more and more of the spirit 
of high romance till you yourselves will 
marvel at the magic of the Alma Mater's 
name. " This," as Mr. Justice Holmes 
said of something else, " is that little 
touch of the superfluous which is neces- 
sary. Necessary as art is necessary and 
knowledge which serves no mechanical 



no COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

end. Superfluous only as glory is super- 
fluous, or a bit of red ribbon that a man 
would die to win." 

Besides drawing the breath of college 
loyalty, which may find expression in a 
thousand ways, the graduate should have 
achieved ability to look at more than one 
side of a question. Men who " know 
black and white but not gray " find much 
less discomfort and much more self-satis- 
faction than men who know gray in all 
shades, and to whom scarcely anything 
is unquestioned white or black. Men 
who see every object as if it lay between 
two walls, and see it clearly and see it 
hard, have less to keep them awake 
nights than men who know no walls and 
see every object as one part of a wide- 
spreading and complex universe; but 
only the latter can be wise. There is no 
wisdom without acute sensitiveness such 
as gives to any soul but the sublimely 
great varied and constant pain. Yet who 
would shrink from the pain of wider sym- 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE m 

pathy, of quicker discernment, of more 
abundant life? From the beginning, 
knowledge has brought its sorrow. Ca- 
pacity for keener joy means capacity 
for sharper grief: without capacity for 
sharper grief there is no capacity for 
higher service ; and the glory of the 
highest service was the Cross. 

Whatever you do, do it heart and soul, 
but do not sell yourself to it : — 

" Because a man has shop to mind 
In time and place, since flesh must live, 
Needs spirit lack all life behind, 
All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive, 
All loves except what trade can give ? 

But — shop each day and all day long ! 
Friend, your good angel slept, your star 
Suffered eclipse, fate did you wrong ! 
From where these sorts of treasures are 
There should our hearts be — Christ, how far ! " 

" The trouble with that man," said one 
of our best university chemists of one of 
his best pupils, "is that he is nothing 
but a chemist." 



ii2 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

Yet we must not make shop one thing 
and life another ; and since we must not 
make life shop, we must make shop life. 
Into everything we do we must try to 
put leaven. If asked for what college 
stands beyond all else, I should be 
tempted to say, " For the high meaning 
of the everyday act and the everyday 
life ; for the beauty of work, of unselfish 
devoted work, with ambition to do the 
appointed task." If a higher task comes, 
take it as you took the lower — always 
with scrupulous fidelity and with that 
touch of something beyond mere accu- 
racy which makes fidelity heroic. I have 
seen men and women filling subordinate 
positions with this kind of heroism — 
men and women whose lives, shut close 
as it seemed on every side, would have 
been arid as the sand if, in their hearts, 
they had not said, like Christian's daugh- 
ter in " The Pilgrim's Progress," " I pur- 
pose never to have a clog to my soul." 

I say all this because there was never 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 113 

greater need of that fidelity whereby the 
drudgery of daily life becomes transfig- 
ured. " Much of my life," said President 
Eliot once, " is what many persons would 
call drudgery. Within a few days I have 
gone through the entire salary list of the 
instructors and assistants in the univer- 
sity; and I do it every year." No one 
knows better than he that the president 
of a college or the president of a country is 
more slave than king, and that nowadays 
a king is a kind of slave. Success does 
not and cannot mean escape from work. 
Yet on every side we see men demand- 
ing a full share of the luxuries of life and 
a decrease of its labor. Eight hours of 
eager unremitting work may be enough 
for a mechanic or for a common laborer ; 
but how many give even that ? How a 
little or a good deal is shaved off each 
end of the day and off both sides of the 
middle ! how languidly and perfunctorily 
the task is done ! Street laborers, elbow 
to elbow, feebly lift their picks a few 



114 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

inches above the surface of the earth and 
trust the fall to the force of gravity; 
washerwomen charge you by the hour 
for eating copious and frequent meals 
in your kitchen ; carpenters light their 
pipes over your sawdust and shavings 
and chat pleasantly at your expense with 
whoever passes by. "Less work for 
more money ! " is the constant cry ; and 
if the cost of living increases (as it must 
when everybody does less work for more 
money), less work and more money still. 
I have known a man hauling stone to 
leave a block in a crooked woods road 
where it wrecked the next carriage, be- 
cause five o'clock had come and nothing 
(with an oath) should make him work 
after five o'clock. Charles Dudley War- 
ner prophesies that, when labor gets 
to be ten dollars a day, the workmen 
will not come at all — " they will send 
their cards." Everywhere men proceed 
on the assumption that the ideal life is 
not to work at all and to be paid hand- 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 115 

somely for not working. Yet there is no 
more elusive happiness than the happi- 
ness of not working. He who takes labor 
as self-respecting service which yields 
daily bread to him and his and which 
makes his life worth something is happy 
in his work and wants to do all the work 
he can ; he who takes it as a necessary 
evil is never happy in or out of it and is 
of small use in the world : — 

"He is a swinward, but I think 
No swinward of the best ; 
For much he recketh of his swink 
And carketh for his rest." 

The college man or woman should learn 
that in an earnest world no loafer counts. 
One of the most industrious and use- 
ful men I know has had no fixed occu- 
pation ; but he wastes less time than 
most professional men, and much less 
than most so-called laboring men. "It 
is only the laboring classes," some one 
has said, " who can afford an eight-hour 
day." He who goes to his work with the 



n6 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

right spirit will soon find more work. 
His usefulness makes him known ; and 
he is unexpectedly called on for many 
kinds of service. " That 's a good man," 
says Hawkins of Scott in Mr. Kipling's 
" William the Conqueror." " If all goes 
well, I shall work him hard." "This," 
the author adds, "was Jim Hawkins's 
notion of the highest compliment one 
human being could pay another." Not 
one of us has an excuse for becoming 
what Homer calls an ax#os dpovp^s, a dead 
weight on the earth. Every college man 
or woman is in honor bound to be not 
disobedient to the heavenly vision, and, 
in the light of that vision, to lead a life 
of work. 

But what of marriage ? It was of pro- 
posed or suggested marriage, you re- 
member, that Christian's daughter said 
what I have quoted — not of marriage 
in general, but of marriage with an alert, 
self-seeking, unprincipled man, like some 
of the so-called "hustlers" of to-day. 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 117 

Now I believe in marriage with all my 
heart ; and I believe in the marriage of 
educated women — provided they marry 
the right men. I have heard it whispered 
that women often wonder at the kind of 
girls men marry. " Love is said to be 
blind," an American humorist remarked. 
" But," he added, " I know some fellows 
who see more in their girls than ever I 
could." Yet for every man who clogs 
his soul with a wife there must be sev- 
eral women who clog their souls with 
husbands. "It is astonishing," said a 
friend of mine, " how many women are 
willing to take upon themselves the sup- 
port of inefficient men ; " if women knew 
what they should know, it would be 
more astonishing how many women and 
what good women will marry fast men. 
The woman of to-day should be shel- 
tered from the evil of the world by every 
man who has chivalry in him ; but the 
educated woman of to-day should not be 
kept in ignorance of such evil as may 



u8 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

come close to her own life and the lives 
of her nearest and dearest. There is 
no excuse for an education that suffers 
a clean-hearted girl to crown what she 
would call the "wild" life of her lover 
with a halo of romance. She should know 
just what such a life means before she 
consents to marry a man who leads or 
has led it. The fancied loss of refine- 
ment in her knowing is nothing to the 
loss of refinement that may result from 
her not knowing. I do not say that a 
woman is never justified in marrying 
such a man ; for she may be : I say that 
she should know what she is doing ; that 
the new physical and mental training of 
women should not suffer them to be in 
dark ignorance of the vital truths and 
the vital dangers in their very woman- 
hood. 

In speaking of the relation between 
women and men, I pass from morals to 
manners. The wonderful femininity of a 
girls' college may make girls sufficient 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 119 

unto themselves ; or it may make them 
overvalue men as men (a boys' college 
has corresponding dangers). Too often 
among the girls of to-day the new and 
healthy freedom of young women longs 
to exercise itself, not in the development 
of women as women, but in the assimi- 
lating of women to men. This assimilat- 
ing belongs to modern life in general 
and not to college life in particular. In 
one of Miss Ferrier's novels a gentleman 
walking with two ladies in broad day- 
light gives an arm to each. A genera- 
tion or two ago a gentleman who did 
not offer his arm to a lady in the even- 
ing would hardly have been a gentleman 
at all ; now (I say it with regret) a gen- 
tleman who does offer it is either rustic 
or old-fashioned. The girl of to-day has 
more independent manners and, happily, 
has along with them a freer life. She 
may ride a horse without an accompany- 
ing groom ; she may bestride a horse ; 
she may row and run and swim and 



120 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

take her part in a hundred athletic ex- 
ercises without being one whit less a 
woman : but some things she had better 
leave to men. Fiercely competitive ath- 
letics have their dangers for men ; but 
they develop manly strength : for women 
their dangers are greater ; and the quali- 
ties that they tend to develop are not 
womanly. Outside of athletics, too, girls 
who imitate men are prone to imitate 
their inferiorities. I am so old-fashioned 
as to believe that girls who smoke ciga- 
rettes are degenerate ; that girls who use 
the rough language of men are, as some 
one has put it, "no gentlemen ;" and 
that even college girls who steal signs 
are thieves. I do not deny that the in- 
born right of woman to smoke cigarettes 
and steal signs is equal to that of man ; 
yet, if the sexes are to be equalized, I 
could wish it were by the refining of men 
and not by the vulgarizing of women. 
The modern girl whose early manners 
are moulded by " Alice in Wonderland," 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 121 

wherein everybody flatly contradicts 
everybody else, and who, as she grows 
up, meets constant temptation to mas- 
culine inferiority, runs the risk of losing 
that gentleness which is not merely one 
of her charms but one source of her 
strength. 

When a man whom we have learned 
to respect tells a story such as men often 
tell among themselves, he is not quite 
the same man to us that he was before ; 
when women to whom we look for all 
that is pure and high fall short of the 
standard we have believed to be theirs, 
much of their power is gone forever. Is 
it just to expect of women more than we 
expect of men? Possibly not just, but 
better than just. To hold either men or 
women responsible for the moral charac- 
ter of all persons with whom they deal — 
of all actors, for example, whom they see 
on the stage — would be worse than ab- 
surd ; yet it is a constant source of won- 
der to me what theatrical shows good 



122 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

women will go to, and will cheerfully 
discuss as the natural amusements of 
ladies and gentlemen. So, too, with 
reading. Some women, no doubt, do 
not care for Browning ; and some are 
ashamed to speak of him for fear they 
shall be called pedantic : yet few are 
ashamed to know all the transient novels 
of the day ; and some are chagrined if 
they cannot keep abreast of the stories 
in the leading magazines, as some are 
troubled if they do not know what is 
going on at the principal theatres. You 
educated women can exert a vast influ- 
ence on the reading taste of the next 
generation — against vulgarity and un- 
scrupulousness in what is called " jour- 
nalism;" against novels and plays that 
tend to undermine the sacredness of 
marriage ; against plays in Which low 
women drilled by lower men are the 
chief attraction : and you can exert this 
influence, not by public invectives which 
advertise and encourage what they con- 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 123 

demn, not by ostentatious virtue, but by 
the quiet abstinence which assumes that 
those whom you love will love whatso- 
ever things are pure and lovely and of 
good report ; not by the blind innocence 
of a child, but by the clear-seeing, intel- 
ligent earnestness of a woman who ab- 
hors that which is evil and cleaves to that 
which is good. In the days when you 
have to "make time" for reading, read 
your newspaper to learn what is doing 
in the world, — not to learn that "the 
bride [whom you do not know] was 
charmingly gowned in white satin," or 
that the divorced wife of some second- 
rate actor is expected to marry a Wall 
Street broker, or that the police have 
unearthed a new witness in the trial of 
Pietro Mazzi for the murder of his rival. 
There is much wisdom in that observa- 
tion of Thoreau's : "If we read of one 
man robbed, or murdered, or killed by 
accident, or one house burned, or one 
vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown 



124 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

up, or one cow run over on the Western 
Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one 
lot of grasshoppers in the winter — 
we never need read of another. One 
is enough. If you are acquainted with 
the principle, what do you care for a 
myriad instances and applications ? " 

" To read well," says the same philo- 
sopher, " that is, to read true books in 
a true spirit, is a noble exercise and one 
that will task the reader more than any 
exercise which the customs of the day 
esteem. It requires a training such as 
the athletes underwent." Keep in train- 
ing ; read daily if you can — and you 
nearly always can — a little of " the best 
that has been known and thought in the 
world." As some one has said, adapting 
the Scripture, " Keep the windows open 
toward Jerusalem." Learn some things 
by heart for dark and wakeful hours, and 
see how the poetry reveals itself more 
and more clearly, till the obscure is full 
of meaning and the great and high and 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 125 

simple has increased its own meaning 
tenfold. What are murder and millinery 
to such reading- as this ? 

Let us consider for what the intellec- 
tual life of a girls' college chiefly stands : 
not for the belittling of those graceful 
accomplishments which add to the joy 
of life, but for something solid, to which, 
if time serves, those accomplishments 
may be added ; not for what is called, 
almost in cant, self-development, unless 
self-development is to end in self-forget- 
fulness ; not for a life of exclusive spe- 
cialization, which is too often an arid 
life ; not for such a reaction from over- 
femininity as shall lead to absorption in 
clubs and politics. It stands for the de- 
velopment, in a woman, of a clear-headed 
integrity which, when supported by her 
intuitive insight, makes her life the best 
human standard of right and wrong. 
The untrained woman sometimes amazes 
us by such untruthfulness as would ostra- 
cize a man. An extreme example is Nora 



126 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

in Ibsen's " A Doll's House." When her 
husband is sick, she raises money to take 
him on a journey ; and she raises it by 
forging a signature. Confronted with the 
charge of crime, she fails to see the point : 
" Do you mean to say that it was wrong 
to save my husband's life ? " 

Mr. Meredith, you may remember, in 
" Diana of the Crossways," makes his 
heroine, who is betrothed to a minister 
of state and has run heavily into debt 
entertaining him and his friends, sell to 
a newspaper a state secret he has given 
her overnight. This instance is hardly 
fair, since those of us who have watched 
Diana up to the fatal moment believe 
(we think we know) that such a woman 
could not do such an act, and suspect that 
her betrayal of the Honorable Percy is a 
tour de force of Mr. Meredith, who needs 
somehow to get the Honorable Percy out 
of the way and to clear the deck for 
Tom Redworth, the man of Mr. Mere- 
dith's choice ; yet the mere fact that this 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 127 

novelist could make an upright and loyal 
and able woman do through mental con- 
fusion an act in itself so base is significant. 
Among the people who are intellectually 
rather than morally untruthful, who would 
tell the truth if they saw it but who can- 
not see it, there are, I am afraid, more 
women than men — women whose sense 
of history is intuitive and whose sense of 
present fact is more emotional than sci- 
entific. Even women who have set out 
to purify politics have proposed as mat- 
ters of course such political schemes as 
no honest man would endure. Now col- 
lege training does not stifle the emotional 
in women ; but it may train women to 
see clearly and to speak accurately. The 
best poet is no less a poet for knowing 
how to write prose ; and the best train- 
ing of the mind is no clog to the soul. 

Girls' colleges were not created to 
make girls imitate men, even in their 
minds ; they were created to correct the 
weakness and to strengthen the strength 



128 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

of women as women. In purity of heart, 
in self-forgetful service, in spiritual in- 
sight, in nearly all that is devoted and 
deep and high, the women of civilized 
countries have advanced far beyond the 
men. If along with this advance there 
once sprang up in our weaker sisters the 
notion that timidity is pretty, that inva- 
lidism is interesting, and that uselessness 
is a charm, let us thank the century that 
has just closed for clearing the air. Let 
us thank the girls' colleges for their re- 
cognition of the claims of a girl's mind, 
for their strong common sense, for their 
ideals of womanhood. Now for good and 
now for evil, the power of women is 
everywhere in the land. Half the bad 
things done by men are done under the 
fascination of those women who draw 
men down ; nearly all the good things 
are done with the courage that men get 
from women who believe in them. As to 
public life, I am still so conservative as to 
hold that a political competition of both 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 129 

sexes is less likely to elevate men than 
to degrade women, and that the peculiar 
strength of refined and earnest woman- 
hood is exercised in ways less public. 
I fear the loss of the best that is in wo- 
man — and, with it, the loss of a power 
that is hers and hers alone. 

I have spoken too much of what wo- 
men should not do and have said little 
of what they can do — of what they must 
do if they are to fulfil the high possibili- 
ties of their lives. If I have rushed in 
where angels fear to tread, I have done 
it as one who loves and reverences good 
women beyond all else on earth. As sis- 
ters, as wives, as mothers, as friends, as 
helpers to all that is noble, you the edu- 
cated women of this generation have a 
responsibility and an influence that should 
make you at once happy and grave — 
happy because of the limitless power for 
good that comes of doing day by day 
what must be done, and of seeing, even 
in the drudgery of it, " a light that never 



130 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

was on sea or land ; " grave, lest in 
times of human weakness, you may turn 
from the light and may see only a sad 
and dull routine in a world of darkness 
and sorrow. In these hours, which may 
be only the reactionary consequence of 
the best work you have ever done — the 
nervous depression that follows nervous 
exaltation — learn to say with the old 
philosopher, "This too shall pass," and 
learn to look, even at your own weari- 
ness, with the eyes of a poet. For I still 
believe that, though few women have 
been great poets, it is part of a woman's 
mission to put poetry into life. 

Going back to the rose and the cab- 
bage, I may say that the college woman's 
business is not to scorn the cabbage but 
to invest it with a rose motive, to see the 
light that kindles the commonplace into 
everlasting truth. People talk a good 
deal about loss of dignity; but the one 
sure way of losing dignity is through 
constant fear of losing it. I like that 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 131 

story of President Roosevelt which says 
that, as he travelled by coach from his 
sister's country place to the Yale Bicen- 
tennial Celebration, he left the carriage 
and walked a while for exercise ; and, as 
he walked, he saw a farmer vainly trying 
to get his cows in ; and he sprang over 
the wall, drove the cows to the farmer, 
and ran back. The story, I fear, is ficti- 
tious ; but that people should believe it, 
is to the President's honor. His notion 
of dignity is his own and might not do 
for everybody; nor would some other 
man's dignity make up in him for the 
loss of that informal and vigorous natu- 
ralness which endears him to all who 
know him and to thousands, to millions, 
who do not. 

The college graduate who, as such, is 
too fastidious for any honest, helpful work 
has missed one of the best things that 
either college or Christianity can teach. 
Among the many sentences that stand 
by you in Mr. Kipling's " William the 



132 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

Conqueror," that wonderful story to 
which I have already referred, is Haw- 
kins's remark when he is reproached for 
the kind of work he is giving Scott. 

"He's not a coolie," says the heroine 
wrathfully ; " he ought to be doing his 
regulation work." 

" He 's the best man in the service," 
Hawkins answers, a and that 's saying a 
good deal ; but if you must use razors 
to cut grindstones, why, I prefer the best 
cutlery." 

Every day of our lives we see fine steel 
put to coarse uses ; and sometimes we 
rebel at a world where such things can 
and must go on. We see quiveringly 
delicate lives dashing themselves, as it 
seems, against hard, unyielding wicked- 
ness ; and we cry out at the wrong. We 
forget that it is sensitive men and women 
who can do the best work among men 
and women, because they and they only 
can understand hearts unlike their own ; 
because they and they only can see the 



AT WELLES LEY COLLEGE 133 

glory of the forbidding task. Even the 
same quality that without training makes 
them lose their heads enables them with 
training to walk steadily on the brink of 
precipices; the same quick apprehen- 
siveness that makes them timid becomes, 
under control, a minister to the highest 
courage, enabling shrinking women to 
face death, and what is infinitely worse 
than death — apparently hopeless life. 
The poet Crashaw remembering the 
Christian martyrs cries, — 

" Oh that it were as it was wont to be 
When Thy old friends of fire, all full of Thee, 
Fought against frowns with smiles, gave glorious 

chase 
To persecutions, and against the face 
Of death and fiercest dangers, durst with brave 
And sober pace march on to meet a grave. 
On their bold breasts about the world they bore 

Thee, 
And to the teeth of hell stood up to teach 

Thee ; 
In centre of their inmost souls they wore Thee, 
Where racks and torments strived in vain to 

reach Thee." 



134 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

Even in our own days we have seen a 
spirit as fine and high among educated 
men and women. As a child, I saw Gov- 
ernor Andrew review on Boston Com- 
mon the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the 
first black regiment, whose white com- 
mander, scarcely more than a boy, Colo- 
nel Robert Gould Shaw, lives to-day in 
the hearts of Harvard men as the very 
flower of American knighthood, as the 
symbol of high idealism, of romantic 
loyalty to college and to country. Just 
before the assault on Fort Wagner, a 
man who believes himself to be the last 
white man that ever talked with Robert 
Shaw, carried him a message : 1 — 

" General Strong presents his compli- 
ments to Colonel Shaw and tells him 
that he expects the Fifty-fourth to do its 
duty." 

" Tell General Strong," was the an- 

1 This story is told by President Thwing of 
Western Reserve University, who heard it from 
the messenger. 



AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 135 

swer, " that the Fifty-fourth will immor- 
talize itself" — "and," says the soldier 
who took the message, " in half an hour 
he was among the immortals." 

"What has it all been for?" For the 
knowledge that makes life richer; for 
the friendship that makes life sweeter ; 
for the training that brings power to the 
task which is hard and high ; for the 
wisdom that suffers and triumphs and 
is strong ; for the vision that shall light 
your way like a pillar of fire ; for the 
truth that shall make you free. 



DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL 
AND COLLEGE 



DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL AND 
COLLEGE 

A PAPER WRITTEN FOR THE CONTEM- 
PORARY CLUB OF ST. LOUIS 

Nothing makes me feel older than the 
recollection that I was brought up in 
the days of corporal punishment at New 
England public schools. Even now, there 
are, no doubt, district schools wherein 
questions of discipline must be settled 
by a fight in which the best man wins. 
Sometimes the best man is the teacher, 
sometimes a pupil ; and, if the pupil 
wins, the teacher goes. Recently a young 
woman from Radcliffe College taught a 
school in which she was obliged to flog 
boys so large that nothing but gallantry 
on their part enabled her to do it. Such 
cases, however, are remote and rural. 



140 DISCIPLINE IN 

They belong to peaceful country life, and 
are not deliberately contemplated as part 
of a school system in thickly settled and 
civilized regions. Yet I have seen in a 
New England grammar school the mas- 
ter struggling with a boy, a settee broken 
in the struggle, master and boy, pur- 
suer and pursued, dashing wildly through 
the school room, a scene of wrath and 
danger ; and I remember when thirty or 
forty years ago the people of Cambridge 
were so excited by a severe case of cor- 
poral punishment that they hastened the 
end of all corporal punishment in the 
public schools. Nor must these specific 
cases be regarded as evidence that the 
masters were brutal : in the second case, 
the master was acknowledged as one of 
the best in the city ; in the first, he was 
a man whom, after all these years, I still 
regard as one of the best teachers I 
have ever known and one of the kindest. 
These men were part of a system which 
we have happily outgrown ; and in at 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 141 

least one of them was an unusual share 
of that very relation towards pupils 
which has helped us outgrow it. His 
predecessor, a wonderfully popular and 
kind-hearted teacher, had a favorite pun- 
ishment which he called "driving the 
nail." When a number of boys were 
troublesome in any way, — when, for in- 
stance, they failed badly in their lessons, 
— he stood them on a platform and 
made them bend over in a row, each 
touching the floor with one finger. He 
then walked the rounds behind them, 
applying the ruler. In the same city, a 
good Harvard man who kept a private 
school used to flog with the ruler the 
hands of the boys whose fathers paid 
him. Some of these boys were the most 
aristocratic in a fine old New England 
city. One, whom I have seen writhing 
under the ruler, has since sent his own 
boy to Groton, where the whole theory 
of discipline is intensely modern. 

Now, just as in outgrowing the old 



142 DISCIPLINE IN 

harshness of compulsory education we 
have sometimes made school work too 
easy, so in outgrowing corporal punish- 
ment we have sometimes made school 
discipline too slack. Mr. Dooley, you 
remember, describes a scene at a Kin- 
dergarten in which one child is pulling 
another's hair, while the teacher observes 
that the child whose hair is pulled is 
learning patience, and the child who is 
pulling the hair is discovering the futility 
of human endeavor. There is, however, 
a reasonable theory somewhere ; and, at 
the risk of being commonplace, I am go- 
ing to say what seems reasonable to me, 
and what, so far as my experience goes, 
has brought the best result. No school 
or college discipline can be perfect ; but 
school and college discipline become 
more nearly perfect according as the 
teachers possess, beside strong character, 
unquestioned sympathy with young peo- 
ple and unquestioned integrity. When I 
say " unquestioned," I imply tact, cour- 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 143 

tesy, and possibly humor ; for without at 
least the first of these qualities no sym- 
pathy can be unquestioned, and without 
the others some sympathy misses fire. 
Tact, courtesy, and a sense of humor 
are in most of us intermittent, and hence 
some of our failures. Men may be able, 
upright, and genuinely sympathetic, yet 
quite unable to make young people know 
their sympathy or even feel their upright- 
ness, except on long acquaintance. Such 
men are, among young people, ineffec- 
tive. A just teacher may be hated and 
an unjust teacher loved, if the just man 
cannot show sympathy at short notice 
and the unjust man cannot help show- 
ing it. 

The foundation of school discipline 
should be laid by parents ; for they can 
best lead children to expect sympathy 
and straightforwardness in older peo- 
ple. One of the surprises to a disciplin- 
ary officer in a school or a college is 
the want of confidence between many 



144 DISCIPLINE IN 

boys and their parents. Instead of being 
the first persons to whom boys turn 
in times of trouble, parents are fre- 
quently the last, — not necessarily be- 
cause they are unjust or cold-hearted 
(they may be quite the reverse) but 
because they have never succeeded in 
showing their children that kind of sym- 
pathy to which a son naturally turns. No 
one who deals with boys at school or 
college can fail to see how much should 
be forgiven to those boys whose fathers 
have never stood toward them in a rela- 
tion of straightforward affection. 

In teachers of boys ready sympathy 
and absolute straightforwardness are so 
important, that I, for one, place them 
above high scholarship. That brilliant 
writer, Professor Miinsterberg, justly de- 
plores the lack of learning in American 
teachers. If all learned men had the 
vigor and the magnetism of Professor 
Miinsterberg, his complaint would have 
even more weight than it has now. The 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 145 

difficulty is that, though no teacher can 
have learned too much, yet, the love of 
learning may unfit a man to be a teacher 
of boys. A scholar who becomes ab- 
sorbed in a scholar's life may lose pa- 
tience with immature minds; and his 
naturally human feeling toward men may 
be weakened by his interest in books. In 
human relations he may fail to rub off 
what Dryden would call the "rust that 
he contracted while laying in his stock 
of learning," and may take his Doctor's 
degree remote from men and still more 
remote from boys. The modern school- 
master's work is vastly more than having 
or even imparting knowledge. It pene- 
trates and compasses the boy's whole 
living ; it cannot be done without enthu- 
siastic drudgery in small and unlearned 
things, without a devotion to common- 
place details, such as characterizes a 
good mother's care of a young child, 
without what a man of remote learning 
regards as wasting time, without a de- 



146 DISCIPLINE IN 

liberate putting into the background of 
what people call the development and 
expansion of one's own self. " I want," 
young teachers write, " a larger field for 
my own growth and my own career." 
Yet often, as Dr. Holmes would say, in 
the place they already occupy they " rat- 
tle round ; " they fail to know their far- 
reaching power where they are for good 
or for evil, and to know that out of the 
very things they are shirking now come 
the growth and the career. As I see 
every year the number of Doctors of 
Philosophy who are let loose upon the 
world, and as I know that there are not 
nearly enough college places for them 
all, I fear that the time will come when 
we shall be in danger not of over- 
educated but of over- learned school- 
masters, when we shall overestimate the 
higher learning in the men who teach 
our boys. The influence of a schoolmas- 
ter for good or for evil cannot be escaped. 
The more learning the better, if in his 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 147 

learning a man remains sweet and sound ; 
but a schoolmaster who does his work 
grudgingly, and who feels himself above 
it, is an unmistakable influence for the 
bad. It is of vital importance what sort 
of men our schoolmasters are. Many 
of our boarding schools — and board- 
ing schools of high grade — suffer con- 
stantly from the employment of low-paid 
younger masters, who if they succeed 
go elsewhere, and if they fail ought to go 
elsewhere. Yet, when I say " low-paid," 
I do not imply that a teacher should do 
his work for money. The schoolmaster 
who works for money — whatever his 
salary — the schoolmaster who forgets 
what it is to be a boy, the schoolmaster 
who constantly regrets that he is a school- 
master and laments his own thwarted 
career, is unfit for his work. This truth 
is now recognized in our best private 
schools. Again and again, these schools 
reject a scholar for a man who knows not 
half so much, but who seems a man, — 



148 DISCIPLINE IN 

an invigorating influence among boys, 
an influence toward the spirit of leader- 
ship. 

In one of our best schools for boys 
the older and stronger pupils are called 
" prefects," and are put in positions of 
responsibility which bring them into 
close relation with the masters. They do 
not govern the school ; they are subject 
to the masters : but they are consulted by 
the masters as best representing the state 
of mind of the boys in general, and as 
best interpreting to the boys in general 
the state of mind of the masters. They 
are the maturest boys ; and in their re- 
sponsibility they increase their maturity. 
As a result, the school best known for its 
prefect system sends to Harvard College, 
nearly every year, at least one youth who 
stands out in his larger surroundings as 
a leader. In one year three of the class 
presidents in Harvard College were from 
that school, which sends us not more 
than about fifteen boys a year ; and they 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 149 

were presidents of classes in which five 
or six hundred young fellows had the 
right to vote for class officers. Moreover, 
many boys from this school keep in col- 
lege the attitude of the prefect, the re- 
cognition that the main object of student 
and college officer is one and the same, 
— to do the best that can be done for 
every student who comes to the Univer- 
sity; to keep him if he can be made worth 
keeping, and otherwise, for the good of 
the place and for his own good, to send 
him away, though seldom or never with- 
out a hope of coming back. This coop- 
eration between scholar and master, be- 
tween student and professor, is the most 
striking characteristic of modern school 
and college discipline. It is not what is 
called " student government ; " but it is 
better than student government. So far 
as my experience goes, the government 
of a university, or of any large part of 
a university, cannot with safety be en- 
trusted to students ; they are harsher 



150 DISCIPLINE IN 

than their elders, and less just to persons 
that they dislike. Nor do the students 
themselves seriously wish for such re- 
sponsibility and power. In their own 
enterprises, their athletics and athletic 
management, their newspapers, their so- 
cial and debating societies, — in a hun- 
dred things, — they may develop their 
leadership and their administrative ca- 
pacity. In the conduct of the university 
they should, I believe, have great weight 
with the administrative officers and have 
their confidence, but not themselves be 
administrative officers. 

When I say they should have the con- 
fidence of the administrative officers, I 
mean that these officers should so far 
believe in them as not merely to ask 
their opinions, but to speak out their own 
opinions, and lay open to the best of the 
students whatever can honestly be laid 
open to them ; that the officers should 
not hesitate to explain fully the reason 
for this or that act, relying on their own 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 151 

sincerity and openness, on the good will 
of the majority, on the hearty coopera- 
tion of student leaders, and, through stu- 
dent leaders, of the student body. This 
good will and cooperation cannot be 
counted on unless the officers have the 
qualities I have already mentioned, — 
sympathy with youth, and straightfor- 
wardness in all their dealings. I remem- 
ber one large school at which the desks 
in the rooms for study were turned away 
from the platform, so that the master 
might better watch the boys, while they 
could not watch him without turning 
their heads and showing him that they 
were watching him. What can be ex- 
pected of boys who are avowedly dis- 
trusted ? In an open fight the best man 
may be the master ; but in strategy the 
boys nearly always win. 

To illustrate the spirit of the prefects, 
I may recall a few things that have hap- 
pened in Harvard College. A student 
had expressed to me some disgust at 



152 DISCIPLINE IN 

the election of his class president — who 
had been a prefect — on the ground that 
the man was not a natural president ; 
that, though he was a good football 
player, he was a poor hand at the con- 
duct of a class meeting, and had little 
skill in speech. A day or two later the 
same student said : "I have changed my 
mind about X. When one of the fellows 
from his school was drunk in the street 
to-day, and the crowd had got about him 
and were guying him, X came round and 
tried to get him home. When he refused 
to go, X calmly picked him up and car- 
ried him through the street to the dor- 
mitory." Note the incidental advantage 
in having an athlete for a class presi- 
dent. 

Another man from this school came to 
me one day about a clever loafer, whose 
habits were unsteady, and whom the col- 
lege authorities had given up as a bad 
job. Instead of saying, as the conven- 
tional student of twenty years ago would 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 153 

have said, that the man in question was 
a brilliant and fine fellow, sadly misun- 
derstood by the college authorities, he 
began thus : "I am perfectly disgusted 
with him. I never thought he ought to 
be here ; but Y has offered to take him 
into his room and make him work, while 
he is working at the law eight hours a 
day : and I think it is a pretty darned 
good thing in Y ; and I wish you would 
let him try it." I remember also a stu- 
dent whom I called to my office for a 
poor record in his studies, and who 
showed incidentally by his appearance 
and bearing that the radical trouble was 
in his way of life. The best man I could 
think of — far better than any college pro- 
fessor — to take hold of him was a Senior 
who had been a prefect, and who, through 
his ability as an athlete and through the 
general steadiness and helpfulness of his 
character, was admired by everybody in 
the College. He had no reason to be 
especially interested in the fellow I had 



154 DISCIPLINE IN 

just seen — and certainly he had enough 
to do : but I knew that the best students 
and the best men everywhere were al- 
ways ready to do more ; and I asked 
him to take this boy in hand. " I don't 
know that I can make him work," he 
said ; " there is not much to him." " The 
main trouble is," said I, " that he is liv- 
ing wrong." " O, we '11 stop that," he 
said ; and the boy so far recovered as to 
finish his work without discredit, and to 
win his degree. 

This responsibility of the stronger stu- 
dents for the weaker is a common result 
of the prefect system, but is not confined 
to this system. A student from a school 
where there are no prefects came to me 
one day in behalf of a fellow whom the 
administrative board of the College was 
sending away because he would not work. 
" I wish," said the student, " you would 
let me see whether I can do something 
with him. I think I can make him work." 
The administrative board told him to try. 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 155 

He made that fellow work as no teacher 
or combination of teachers could have 
done ; and he brought him through the 
year with success. Moreover, he created 
in him such gratitude and loyalty as I 
have seldom known in one young man 
toward another. 

Some time ago several students dis- 
appeared ; and it was necessary, not for 
disciplinary reasons, but for human rea- 
sons, to find them. How to find them 
was altogether too much for me ; and 
accordingly I went in the evening to this 
same man of whom I have just spoken. 
He was a leader among his fellows and 
a good scholar also, and was now, in his 
fourth year, working for the degree of 
A. M. I found him studying for a final 
examination the next day ; and the day 
after that he was to have another final 
examination. His academic , year had 
been badly broken both by athletics and 
by affairs at home ; and those examina- 
tions were peculiarly important, because 



156 DISCIPLINE IN 

for the Master's degree high marks are 
required. He told me at once where he 
thought the lost men, if they were knock- 
ing about the city, were likely to be found, 
to what theatres they might go, and to 
what restaurants ; and, without a word 
about his work, he said, " I will go to 
Boston with you now." When I would 
not hear of that, he said, " If you want 
me, telephone out. Meantime I shall be 
working here. I shall be up grinding 
until about three o'clock ; I will go over 
to the Institute building before I go to 
bed ; and if I can get any news of them 
there, I will look out for them." 

Of the three men whose help I have 
just recounted, two were class presidents 
and first marshals ; the other was second 
marshal in the same class with one of 
the two. Now when men who are elected 
by their fellow students to the highest 
class offices feel as these men felt, there 
is great hope for the discipline of the Col- 
lege. Half the problem, indeed, is solved. 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 157 

Not long ago I had another extraor- 
dinary instance of this sort of responsi- 
bility among students, — more extraor- 
dinary than any I have named because 
the person who felt it must have been 
younger than the person toward whom 
he felt it. The latter, however, was with- 
out experience, and seemed to need pro- 
tection from an adventuress who was 
ruining his life. 

When I say that college officers should 
sympathize with youth, I do not mean 
that they should sympathize with juve- 
nility, though they should understand it ; 
I mean that they should know and feel 
the peculiar strain to which students are 
subjected. I have heard men speak lightly 
of college temptation. "The truth is," 
they say, " there is no place in the world 
where temptation to evil is so slight 
as in college, because there is no place 
in the world where temptation to ex- 
cellence is so strong." It is true that 
temptation to excellence is strong, that 



158 DISCIPLINE IN 

there is no place in the world where 
higher ideals are set before young men, 
or where there are more forces which, by 
interesting them in good things, may 
drive out bad ones ; but it is also true, 
and must be constantly borne in mind, 
that the step from school to college or 
from home to college is often the first 
step into the world. In a large collegiate 
school, such as Exeter or Andover, the 
boys get the same kind of temptation 
and the same kind of discipline that 
other boys get in college ; but for most 
boys college has — in the beginning, at 
any rate — certain peculiar temptations. 
Wherever hundreds or thousands of young 
men are together, with their first responsi- 
bility for money, and in their first entrance 
to the world, vice is almost thrown at 
them. In a modern college, moreover, 
a student has much more freedom as 
to his time in general, and his evenings 
in particular, than at home or at school ; 
and the remoteness of the work which 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 159 

by and by he must do in the world, 
and the uncertainty what it is to be, 
may prevent him from seeing the rela- 
tion between industry now and success 
in later life. A boy who goes into an 
office may have his evenings free, and 
may have all sorts of temptations ; but 
he must go to a certain place at a certain 
time — and at a pretty early time in the 
morning — or something happens. By 
evening his work may have made him 
healthily tired ; and he knows that his 
advancement in business — and perhaps 
his whole career — will depend on the 
faithfulness and the eagerness with which 
he does the work immediately before 
him. All this the ordinary college boy 
does not see. He is bewildered, even by 
the good opportunities which are set be- 
fore him, not one tenth part of which he 
has time to use. Now this bewilderment 
demands in the college officers who meet 
him no end of sympathy, along with a 
certain sternness of resolution. 



160 DISCIPLINE IN 

I have spoken of the larger side of 
discipline. Noise in dormitories, and 
pranks too puerile for college students, 
should seldom be treated as grave of- 
fences. If possible, a student should be 
taught to see their puerility. Now and 
then, discipline may require the removal 
of a youth prominently engaged in them ; 
but a sharp line should be drawn be- 
tween such offences and dishonesty or 
vice or persistent loafing, or what Pro- 
fessor Shaler has called "miscellaneous 
worthlessness." 

In all relations with students school 
and college officers should, as I have im- 
plied, be as open as they can be without 
violating the confidence of other men. 
In particular, no school or college officer 
should refuse to be open from the notion 
that openness means loss of dignity. 
Dignity is most easily lost by him who 
thinks too much about it; nor is the 
dignity of any two men alike. President 
Eliot's, for example, differs materially 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 161 

from President Roosevelt's ; and we can 
hardly imagine their swapping : but each 
of these gentlemen has in his own way 
extraordinary power over men. In one 
important school the headmaster, a man 
of forty or more, is the right fielder of 
the baseball team; and the masters, in 
general, are intimate friends and play- 
mates of the boys, who do not hesitate 
in play hours to call them by nicknames 
to their faces. This state of things would 
not do for every school ; yet I know no 
school whose pupils come to college with 
more courteous manners. Again, it is 
never in any school or college undigni- 
fied for a teacher to explain any act of 
his that for a boy seems to need explana- 
tion. If in his explanation he reaches a 
point where he must betray other people 
or stop, he need only say, " I am sorry, 
but I have no right to go further." Again, 
it is never undignified for a teacher to 
say in the class-room, " I do not know ; " 
and many a teacher loses the respect of 



162 DISCIPLINE IN 

his pupils from unwillingness to admit 
that he is fallible. 

The cultivation of openness on both 
sides is closely connected with what 
seems the slowness of some reforms in 
our larger colleges. A slow reform is 
much better than an evaded or violated 
prohibition ; and the choice is often be- 
tween these two. The policy of Harvard 
University, for example, is to test every- 
thing by daylight. Instead of forbidding 
certain initiation practices, which it be- 
lieves to be foolish ai\pl occasionally 
cruel, but which it knows no power could 
stop if the societies were secret societies, 
it does all it can to lead the societies into 
publicity, so that even the initiations 
may stand public scrutiny. Public opin- 
ion has already, in the better colleges, 
suppressed hazing. The authorities can 
seldom suppress it: they can merely 
clean up afterward ; and often they may 
send away the wrong men. 

As an example of open relation be- 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 163 

tween administrative officers and stu- 
dents, I give you a dialogue that oc- 
curred in a strong Quaker college. 
" Jones," said the president, who wastes 
few words, "I have reason to believe 
thee is a thief and a liar." " No, Mr. 
President," said Jones, " I am a liar ; but 
I am not a thief." (It is interesting, by the 
way, to consider where this leaves Jones.) 
Above all things, a college officer should 
try not to be the kind of man of whom 
the late Dr. Carroll Everett said, "He 
presents different aspects of a truth to 
different persons." I cannot say with 
Mark Twain that I know honesty to be 
the best policy because I have tried 
both ; but I know it to be the best policy 
because I have seen both. In a college 
that employs no spies, the student him- 
self is treated as the greatest living au- 
thority on his own conduct ; and, when 
he is questioned about it, he is expected, 
as a gentleman, to tell the truth. "Is 
it fair," people sometimes ask, "this 



164 DISCIPLINE IN 

expecting a man to bear witness against 
himself?" Much fairer than expecting 
others to bear witness against him. He 
understands the right of the college to 
call him to account. Again and again 
I have marvelled at the frankness of 
students when squarely asked what they 
have or have not done, at the persist- 
ency of the feeling that, even if they 
have cheated more or less, they cannot, 
as gentlemen, lie when talking face to 
face. Of course there are exceptions, 
often in part the fault of the college offi- 
cer or the result of his want of tact ; yet 
in general, the frankness of students, 
even in bad things, is refreshing. Not 
long since, a man whose college work 
was done but who had not yet his degree 
said to me, " I must leave this place. I 
have got in with fellows who have more 
money than I and live more expensively 
than I ; and I have taken to drinking. I 
must get out into the country." " Temp- 
tation," as Thackeray says, "is an ob- 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 165 

sequious servant, who has no objections 
to the country ; " but this man's imme- 
diate temptation lay among certain city 
associates. " I had been drinking too 
much," said another student, " and when 
the proctor spoke to me I think I in- 
sulted him. I don't know what I said ; I 
only know that at the time it appeared 
to me amusing." Another student, who 
wished to go away for a recess a day 
earlier than the college rules allowed, re- 
marked, " It 's only cutting one lecture." 
When I explained the difficulty of keep- 
ing men till the end of the term, and the 
principle involved in letting a single one 
go, he exclaimed, "But the lecture's in 
such a darned silly course!" an improper 
remark, no doubt ; yet the fact that he 
spoke out went far toward making up 
for the impropriety. 

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higgin- 
son once said of his own college days 
that a student seen walking with an in- 
structor lost caste at once. There has 



166 DISCIPLINE IN 

been no more important change in col- 
lege life of late than the change in the 
relation of student and instructor. In 
nearly every respect the struggle for an 
honest and friendly relation must be suc- 
cessful ; but success comes slowest and 
most doubtfully in questions of honesty 
in written work. Even here a person 
whose written work is dishonest may be 
perfectly straightforward in confessing 
what he has done, — might go to the 
stake rather than deny it. The discour- 
aging thing is that he should do it at all. 
Equally discouraging is his defence. He 
admits that, looked at critically, he has 
missed an educational opportunity ; but 
the loss is his only, and need not worry 
the Faculty : if detected, he cannot ex- 
pect credit for his composition ; but to 
suspend him is monstrous. He himself 
affirms that he did what everybody does ; 
that he "had to hand in something," 
was not well, and was short of time ; 
that his name on the theme is a mere 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 167 

label, quite non-committal as to the 
question of authorship ; perhaps that he 
copied from a book which the instruc- 
tor " could not help knowing," and that 
therefore he could mean no deceit (he 
"agreed with Thackeray's ideas and 
could not improve on his language "). 
He adds that he learned to "crib" at 
school. Soon he is reinforced by a father 
who assures the Dean that the young 
man is the very soul of honor, and that 
this " breach of the rules " is the thought- 
lessness of a mere boy, which will never 
show itself again. Like many students 
not interested in their studies, he fails 
to see, first, that the greater part of the 
dishonesty of the world, except that of 
professionally dishonest persons, whom 
we, since we deal with amateurs, may 
disregard, is committed by men under 
pressure, by men who feel that they have 
not time or resources for honesty ; and 
he fails also to see the danger of fool- 
ing with his standard of truth. Suppose 



168 DISCIPLINE IN 

a college officer has promised to write 
something for a college paper. No 
money is involved and no glory. He is 
hard pressed for time, and hard pressed 
with excellent reasons — much better 
than those of the idle student. Accord- 
ingly he copies something from another 
writer and prints it as his own. If dis- 
covered, he will justly be regarded by 
every student as a dishonest man ; yet, 
clear as the student's view would be in 
the case I have supposed, there is a real 
difficulty in educating the public opinion 
of a college to honesty in written work, — 
and in excuses for the mild indisposition 
with which some students are often and 
perfunctorily afflicted. No penalty has 
proved satisfactory. Our common pen- 
alty in Cambridge for dishonesty in 
written work is suspension ; but suspen- 
sion is more and more unsatisfactory as 
years go by. In old times a suspended 
student was rusticated, as it was called. 
Some country minister took him in 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 169 

charge and heard his lessons : but, with 
the complexity of instruction at Ameri- 
can universities to-day, with the number 
of courses that require excellent labo- 
ratory facilities and extensive libraries, 
old-fashioned rustication becomes impos- 
sible ; and the suspended student is in 
the position of a man obliged to do a 
certain piece of work by the very au- 
thorities who have cut off his opportu- 
nity of doing it. I suppose we must wait 
in this matter for the slowly developed 
sense of documentary honesty among 
students. The " honor system," so called, 
is as yet, I believe, experimental. What 
worries me about putting students on 
their honor in all matters of written work 
is the fact that they cheat most in those 
exercises in which they are put on their 
honor now. 

After all, the most serious question of 
discipline in the college of to-day is how 
to get from our students intellectual work. 
Want of responsibility to work rather 



170 DISCIPLINE IN 

than radical dishonesty is at the root of 
such dishonest acts as I have described. 
In the attitude toward work a consid- 
erable number of students are still boys 
and not men. It is only in athletics that 
some of them recognize the flimsiness of 
excuses, the necessity of hard training, 
the responsibility of duty day by day, the 
meanness of the " quitter." As to excuses, 
I have heard a college officer whose busi- 
ness it is to pass on them described as 
" a man you lie to and get mad with for 
not believing you ; " and this definition 
shows how dexterously the unthinking 
student uses in college morals a double 
standard, and how flexible he is in trans- 
forming himself from man to boy and 
from boy to man, according to his own 
immediate advantage. The most search- 
ing temptation of a Freshman when he 
first finds himself turned loose in a uni- 
versity is the temptation to idleness. 
Some Freshmen act as if in entering col- 
lege they had scaled the mountain of 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 171 

life and had nothing to do but to picnic 
on the summit. Their natural desire to 
get into this or that club, their knowledge 
that they cannot get into it without wide 
acquaintance, and their belief that wide 
acquaintance involves free use of social 
hours at all times of the day, lead them 
to loafing. Thus far the influence of the 
club is bad, though later a clubman may 
be upheld in his work and driven to his 
work by those members of the club who 
see his danger. The radical difficulty 
about work among students comes, in 
part, from the prevalent theory of educa- 
tion through which boys and young men 
have things done for them, sometimes 
for their amusement, sometimes for their 
information, instead of being taught to 
do things for themselves. I lately talked 
with an intelligent and delightful Sopho- 
more who had excused himself for ab- 
sence on the ground that he had gone 
with a sick companion to a " phizician." 
I cheerfully accepted his excuse, but told 



172 DISCIPLINE IN 

him that I did not like to see him spell 
physician in that way. " I know," he re- 
plied, " I did n't know how to spell that 
word : mamma was n't at home ; and I 
did n't know." Yet this boy came from 
a school recognized as among the best, 
and from educated parents ; and even 
in Boston, mamma, when she goes out, 
leaves the dictionary behind her. Possi- 
bly he was like the other student who 
said, " What 's the use of looking in the 
dictionary for a word if you don't know 
the letter it begins with ? " 

A large part of the discipline of a col- 
lege, in the widest sense of the word 
discipline, lies in the training toward 
power for the emergencies and the strains 
of life. Even the knowledge a student 
acquires is of value chiefly to that end. 
Now nobody ever got power through 
being amused and having things done 
for him. This principle is, as I have inti- 
mated, recognized in athletics ; and hence 
comes much of the value of athletics. 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 173 

In school or college no discipline is effec- 
tive which does not emphasize work, the 
duty of boy or man to do whatever is 
before him, and by doing it to get inter- 
ested in it. " We have no serious diffi- 
culty in the conduct of our boys," said the 
master of a new school ; "we have found 
them courteous, obedient, well disposed ; 
but it has taken us weeks to make them 
understand that the first thing to do 
is their work." This same master has 
devised a seal for the school, a shield 
adorned with a hammer and an anvil ; 
and round about the shield are the words, 
" Veritas, Fides, Labor." The difficulty 
that he finds we find in college — and 
in a higher degree — because in college 
the students are less closely supervised, 
and need not recite every day in every- 
thing they are supposed to study. 

What I have said is by no means 
inconsistent with the advocacy of an 
elective system, since every study, if it 
is to have more than a mere cultivating 



174 DISCIPLINE IN 

value, demands solid work. Not long 
ago the Administrative Board of Harvard 
College sent away eight or ten Fresh- 
men for loafing. Every one of these 
Freshmen was quite capable of doing his 
work ; every one, I believe, had come 
from what we must call a good school ; 
many of them were unusually attractive 
boys, and by no means bad boys ; not 
one of them would heed the warnings of 
the college authorities ; and, with great 
tribulation, they left us. Every one left 
us with the understanding that, though 
the door was shut, he might by good 
work outside, and by certain examina- 
tions which are offered every year, open it 
again. It is true of most of these Fresh- 
men that nothing in their college life 
became them like the leaving it. No 
one could talk with them and not feel an 
intense personal interest in them as mis- 
guided boys, blind boys, whose eyes could 
be opened by nothing but adversity. 
"If," said the late Professor Dunbar, "a 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 175 

dean regards himself as something more 
than a prosecuting officer, it is interesting 
to see how you can help some of these 
fellows through ; " and he would have 
been slow to deny the helpfulness of tem- 
porary adversity. Let me say once more 
that the root of all discipline, whether dis- 
cipline for efficiency in life or discipline 
for the development of character, for the 
resistance of temptation, is in steady, 
whole-hearted work, whether the subject 
of the work is at first sight alluring or 
forbidding. 

I do not believe in crowding children 
with study. The hours of work may 
be short; and for many children they 
should be short. I find myself strangely 
at variance with the men who lead the 
educational thought of to-day ; though I 
believe more strongly than they in pre- 
scribing work for boys, I do not believe 
that American boys should go to college 
much earlier than they go now. Many 
writers on education overlook, I think, 



176 DISCIPLINE IN 

the time lost in the mere sicknesses of 
childhood. I should rather, for instance, 
have my boy go to college a year later 
than force him to injure his eyes by 
hard work after measles. Again, what- 
ever may be true of European children, 
the American child lives in an atmos- 
phere peculiarly stimulating, peculiarly 
dangerous to the nervous system. The 
over-stimulating of ambitious children 
during the time of rapid bodily growth, 
especially during the marked physical 
changes which lead from youth to man- 
hood or womanhood, may damage the 
children and the race. Not long ago I 
heard a professor, himself a German, say 
with pride that in the summer he gave 
his boy of fifteen a quarter of a dollar 
for every morning that he got up at four 
to study, and that the boy used his first 
dollar in buying an alarm clock. I doubt 
whether our American children will ever 
be physically and intellectually mature 
so early as the German children or the 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 177 

French ; but while they work, they should 
understand that work is to be done ener- 
getically and thoroughly. 

One thing more : we cannot discipline 
boys or young men by trying to tell them 
all the things they should not do. The 
number of definite prohibitions should, I 
believe, be small. Nobody can cover the 
ground. In a college which used to make 
some small attempt at covering it, I have 
heard a gambler defended by a clergy- 
man on the ground that gambling was 
not prohibited by the rules. 

To me the conclusion of the whole 
matter is this : The best discipline, 
whether of school or of college, is that 
which relies on the understanding be- 
tween pupil and teacher that the objects 
of pupil and teacher are one and the 
same ; a discipline based on sympathy 
with all the healthy interests of youth — 
not on weak compassion for the un- 
healthy temptations, though there may 
be a sort of bracing compassion, even 



178 DISCIPLINE IN ' 

for them ; a discipline which allows last- 
ing friendship with pupils who must 
be dismissed or expelled ; a discipline 
which relies on cooperation, wherever 
such cooperation is reasonable, with the 
leaders among the pupils, and through 
the leaders with the great body of the 
pupils ; a discipline based on absolute 
straightforwardness and perfect courtesy 
— for perfect courtesy is consistent with 
absolute straightforwardness ; a disci- 
pline which counts it no loss of dignity 
for an instructor or a master to explain 
his point of view ; a discipline which in- 
sists that there is no training without 
work, and that the work must not be 
done by the trainer only ; a discipline 
which remembers that it is want of train- 
ing which temporarily wrecks many a 
Freshman, and makes his evolution into 
energetic manhood discouragingly slow. 
I believe, further, that in every school 
and in every college there should be an 
effort from the start to make a youth 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 179 

imbibe that wonderful tonic called school 
or college spirit ; to make him feel that 
from the moment he enters a school or a 
college he has become forever a part of 
it, one of its makers, and that through- 
out his life, wherever he goes, he takes 
with him, dragging or exalting it, as the 
case may be, the name of his school or 
of his college. Once get a deep, high 
loyalty, and the problem of discipline is 
gone. 



THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE 
LIFE 



THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE 
LIFE 

A TALK TO BOYS ON THE POINT OF 
ENTERING COLLEGE 

In a certain sense, college is the place 
for mistakes. In college a young man 
tests his strength, and, while testing it, 
is protected from the results of failure far 
more effectively than he will ever be pro- 
tected afterward. The youth who is de- 
termined to succeed in public speaking 
may stand up again and again in a col- 
lege debating club, may fail again and 
again, and through his failure may rise 
to success ; whereas if he should put off 
his efforts until some political campaign 
had called him to the stump, no audience 
would listen to him, or even let him go 



— 



184 THE MISTAKES OF 

on. " The mistakes that make us men," 
says Dr. Lyman Abbott, " are better than 
the accuracies that keep us children." 
Yet even in college there are mistakes 
by which the career of a happy, well- 
meaning youth is suddenly darkened ; 
and though he may learn out of the very 
bitterness of his experience, he is never 
quite the same again. 

All boys with a fair chance in the world 
have at their best a common motive, — 
to be of some use, to lead active, efficient 
lives, to do something worth doing, and 
to do it well, to become men on whom 
people instinctively and not in vain rely. 
Men and women may be divided roughly 
into two classes, — those who are "there," 
and those who are " not there." The 
" not there " people may be clever, 
may be what is called " good company," 
may have, even after you know them 
pretty well, a good deal of personal 
charm ; but once know them through 
and through, and you have no use for 



COLLEGE LIFE 185 

them. The " there " people may be un- 
polished, unmagnetic, without social 
charm ; but once understand that they 
are " there, " and you get help and com- 
fort from the mere knowledge that there 
are such people in the world. Every boy 
in his heart of hearts admires a man who 
is " there," and wishes to be like him ; 
but not every boy (and here is the sad 
part of it) understands that to be " there" 
is the result of a long process, the result 
of training day by day and year by year, 
precisely as to be a sure man (I do not 
say a brilliant man) in the pitcher's box 
or behind the bat is the result of long 
training. A single decision or indecision, 
an act of a moment or a moment's fail- 
ure to act, may turn a whole life awry ; 
but the weakness of that moment is only 
the expression of a weakness which for 
months or for years has been undermin- 
ing the character, or at best the result of 
a failure to train body, mind, and heart 
for the emergencies of life. 



1 86 THE MISTAKES OF 

In this training we can learn, if we 
will, from other people's experience ; and 
although boys are loath to accept any- 
body's experience but their own, and are 
not always wise enough to accept that, 
it is yet worth while to show them some 
dangers which other boys have met or 
have failed to meet, that they may not 
be taken unawares. A great man, almost 
too far above the temptations of the aver- 
age boy to understand them, has con- 
demned talking to boys and young men 
about temptation ; he would fill their 
minds with good things: but there are 
no boys whose minds are so full of good 
things that a temptation cannot get in 
edgewise. An absorbing interest in a 
good something or a good somebody 
holds back and may finally banish the 
worst temptations ; it is quite as impor- 
tant to interest boys in good things as 
to take away their interest in bad ones : 
but when all is said, the lightest hearted 
boy who comes to manhood must come 



COLLEGE LIFE 187 

to it " through sorrows and through 
scars." 

To many boys the beginning of col- 
lege life is the first step into the world. 
Its dangers are much like those of other 
first steps into the world, yet with this 
difference : the college boy has the ad- 
vantage of living where ideals are noble, 
and the disadvantage (if he is weak or 
immature) of living where he need not 
get heartily tired day after day in keep- 
ing long, inevitable hours of work. This 
disadvantage is indeed a privilege, but a 
privilege which like all privileges is bad 
unless accorded to a responsible being. 
To discipline one's self, to hold one's self 
responsible, is ever so much better than 
to be disciplined, to be held responsible 
by somebody else ; but it is a task for a 
man. Naturally enough, then, the mis- 
takes and the sins of college life are 
commonly rooted in boyish irresponsi- 
bility. 

The average youth takes kindly to the 



188 THE MISTAKES OF 

notion that in the first year or two at 
college he need not be bound by the or- 
dinary restraints of law-abiding men and 
women. "Boys will be boys," even to 
the extent of sowing wild oats. Time 
enough to settle down by and by ; mean- 
while the world is ours. A year or so 
of lawlessness will be great fun, and will 
give us large experience ; and even if 
we shock some good people, we are but 
doing the traditional thing. A youth 
who feels thus takes prompt offence if 
treated, as he says, " like a kid ; " yet he 
may do things so low that any honest 
child would despise them. Nor is this 
true of one sex only. I have heard a mar- 
ried woman recount with satisfaction her 
two nights' work in stealing a sign when 
she was at college ; and her father, a col- 
lege man, listened with sympathetic joy. 
I have known a youth who held a large 
scholarship in money to steal, or — as he 
preferred to say — " pinch," an instru- 
ment worth several dollars from the lab- 



COLLEGE LIFE 189 

oratory where he was trusted as he would 
have been trusted in a gentleman's par- 
lor. I have even heard of students who 
bought signs, and hung them up in their 
rooms to get the reputation of stealing 
them. Surely there is nothing in college 
life to make crime a joke. A street 
"mucker" sneaks into a student's room 
and steals half a dozen neckties (for 
which the student has not paid), and 
nothing is too hard for him ; a student 
steals a poor laundry man's sign for fun : 
may a gentleman do without censure 
what sends a "mucker" to jail? If the 
gentleman is locked up in the evening 
to be taken before the judge in the morn- 
ing, his friends are eager to get him out. 
Yet in one night of ascetic meditation 
he may learn more than in his whole 
previous life of his relation to the rights 
of his fellow men. One of the first les- 
sons in college life is an axiom : Crime 
is crime, and a thief is a thief, even at an 
institution of learning. The college thief 



190 THE MISTAKES OF 

has, it is true, a different motive from his 
less favored brother ; but is the motive 
better ? Is there not at the root of it a 
misunderstanding of one man's relation 
to another, so selfish that, in those who 
ought to be the flower of American 
youth, it would be hardly conceivable if 
we did not see it with our own eyes? 
People sometimes wonder at the de- 
sire of towns to tax colleges, instead 
of helping them. A small number of 
students who steal signs, and refuse to 
pay bills unless the tradesman's man- 
ner pleases them, may well account for 
it all. 

As there is nothing in college life to 
justify a thief, so there is nothing in it 
to justify a liar. College boys in their 
relation to one another are quite as truth- 
ful as other people ; but some of them 
regard their dealings with college author- 
ities as some men regard horse-trades. 
We know them capable of distinguish- 
ing truth from falsehood, since their 



COLLEGE LIFE 191 

standard of integrity for their teachers 
is sensitively high. Their standard for 
themselves is part of that conceit, of 
that blind incapacity for the Golden 
Rule, which is often characteristic of 
early manhood. To this blindness most 
books about school and college life con- 
tribute. Even the healthier of these 
books stir the reader's sympathy in be- 
half of the gentlemanly, happy-go-lucky 
youth who pulls wool over the eyes of 
his teachers, and deepen the impression 
that college boys live in a fairyland of 
charming foolery, and are no more mor- 
ally responsible than the gods of Olym- 
pus. Plainly such a theory of college 
life, even if no one holds to it long, 
nurses a selfishness and an insincerity 
which may outlast the theory that has 
nourished them. The man who has his 
themes written for him, or who cribs at 
examinations, or who excuses himself 
from college lectures because of " sick- 
ness " in order to rest after or before a 



192 THE MISTAKES OF 

dance, may be clever and funny to read 
about ; but his cleverness and " funni- 
ness" are not many degrees removed 
from those of the forger and the im- 
postor, who may also be amusing in 
fiction. 

Another bad thing in the substitution 
of excuses, even fairly honest excuses, 
for work is the weakening effect of it on 
everyday life. The work of the world is 
in large measure done by people whose 
heads and throats and stomachs do not 
feel just right, but who go about their 
daily duties, and in doing them forget 
their heads and throats and stomachs. 
He who is to be "there" as a man can- 
not afford to cosset himself as a boy. A 
well-known railroad man has remarked 
that he knows in his business two kinds 
of men : one, with a given piece of work 
to do before a given time, comes back at 
the appointed hour and says, " That job 
is done. I found unexpected difficulties, 
but it is done ; " the other comes back 



COLLEGE LIFE 193 

with "several excellent reasons" why 
the job is not done. " I have," says the 
railroad man, " no use for the second of 
these men." Nor has any business man 
use for him. The world is pretty cold 
toward chronic invalids and excuse- 
mongers. " If you are too sick to be 
here regularly," it says, " I am sorry for 
you, but I shall have to employ a health- 
ier man." You will find, by the way, 
that it is easier to attend all your re- 
citations than to attend half or three- 
quarters of them. Once open the ques- 
tion of not going, and you see " several 
excellent reasons " for staying at home. 
Routine, as all mature men know, stead- 
ies nerves, and, when used intelligently, 
adds contentment to life. 

I have spoken of lying to college offi- 
cers, and of excuses which, if I may use 
an undergraduate expression, " may be 
right, but are not stylish right." I come 
next to the question of responsibility to 
father and mother in matters of truth and 



194 THE MISTAKES OF 

falsehood. One of the evils from vice of 
all sorts at college is the lying that re- 
sults from it. Shame and fear, half dis- 
guised as a desire not to worry parents, 
cut off many a father and mother from 
knowing what they have a right to 
know, and what they, if confided in, 
might remedy. I have seldom seen a 
student in serious trouble who did not 
say — honestly enough, I presume — that 
he cared less for his own mortification 
than for his father's and mother's. As 
a rule, one of his parents is threatened 
with nervous prostration, or oppressed 
with business cares, or has a weak heart 
which, as the son argues, makes the 
receipt of bad news dangerous. Filial 
affection, which has been so dormant as 
to let the student do those things which 
would distress his parents most, awakes 
instantly at the thought that the parents 
must learn what he has done. The two 
severest rebukes of a certain gentle mo- 
ther were : " You ought to have meant 



COLLEGE LIFE 195 

not to," and " You ought to have been 
sorry beforehand." 

Many a student, knowing that the 
college must communicate with his fa- 
ther, will not nerve himself to the duty 
and the filial kindness of telling his fa- 
ther first. I remember a boy who was to 
be suspended for drunkenness, and who 
was urged to break the news to his fa- 
ther before the official letter went. 

" You don't know my father," he said. 
" My father is a very severe man, and I 
can't tell him." 

" The only thing you can do for him," 
was the answer, " is to let him feel that 
you are able and willing to tell him first, 
— that you give him your confidence." 

" Oh, you don't know him," said the 
boy again. 

"Is there any 'out' about your father?" 

"No " (indignantly) ! " You would 
respect him and admire him ; but he 
is a very severe man." 

4< Then he has a right to hear and 



ig6 THE MISTAKES OF 

to hear first from you. You cannot 
help him more than by telling him, or 
hurt him more than by hiding the truth 
from him." 

A day or two later the boy came back 
to the college office. " My father is a 
brick ! " he said. In his confession he had 
learned for the first time how much his 
father cared for him. 

A young man, intensely curious about 
the wickedness of life, is easily persuaded 
that the first business of a college student 
is "to know life," — that is, to know the 
worst things in it ; and, in the pursuit of 
wisdom, he sets out in the evening, with 
others, merely to see the vice of a great 
city. He calls at a house where he meets 
bad men and bad women, and eats and 
drinks with them. What he eats and 
drinks he does not know; but in the 
morning he is still there, with a life stain 
upon him, and needing more than ever 
before to confide in father or mother or 
in some good physician. Yet the people 



COLLEGE LIFE 197 

who can help him most, the people also 
in whom he must confide or be false to 
them, are the very people he avoids. 

Again, it is hard to prove by cold logic 
that gambling is wrong. A young man 
says to himself, " If I wish to spend a dol- 
lar in this form of amusement, why should 
I not ? I know perfectly well what I am 
about I am playing with money not play- 
ing for it In some countries — in Eng- 
land, for example — clergymen, and good 
people generally, play whist with shilling 
stakes, and would not think of playing it 
without." So of vice he says, "No man 
knows human nature until he has seen 
the dark side. I shall be a broader man 
if I know these things ; and some phy- 
sicians recommend the practice of them 
in moderation." When we say, " Lead 
us not into temptation," we forget that 
one of the worst temptations in the world 
is the temptation to be led into tempta- 
tion, — the temptation to gratify vulgar 
curiosity, and to see on what thin ice we 



198 THE MISTAKES OF 

can walk. No man is safe ; no man can 
tell what he shall do, or what others will 
do to him, if he once enters a gambling 
house or a brothel. The history of every 
city, and the history of every college, will 
prove what I say. There is no wisdom 
in looking at such places, — nothing but 
greenness and folly. The difficulty with 
gambling is, as some one has said, that 
" it eats the heart out of a man," — that 
imperceptibly the playing with slips into 
the playing for, until without gambling 
life seems tame : and the difficulty with 
vice is that it involves physical danger 
of the most revolting kind ; that it kills 
self-respect ; that it brings with it either 
shamelessness or a miserable dishonesty 
for decency's sake ; and that it is a breach 
of trust to those who are, or who are 
to be, the nearest and the dearest, — a 
breach of trust to father and mother, and 
to the wife and children, who may seem 
remote and unreal, but who to most 
young men are close at hand. By the 



COLLEGE LIFE 199 

time a boy goes to college, he may well 
feel responsibility to the girl whom some 
day he will respect and love, and who, 
he hopes, will respect and love him. A 
boy's or man's sense of fair play should 
show him that it is effrontery in a man 
who has been guilty of vice with women 
to ask for a pure girl's love. The time is 
only too likely to come when a young 
fellow who has yielded to the tremendous 
sudden temptation that is thrown at him 
in college and in the world, will face the 
bitter question, " Can I tell the truth 
about myself to the girl I love ? If I tell 
it, I may justly lose her ; if I do not tell 
it, my whole life may be a frightened lie." 

" Who is the Happy Husband ? He 
Who, scanning his unwedded life, 
Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free, 
'T was faithful to his future wife." 

Not merely the curiosity which listens 
to false arguments about life and wisdom, 
but the awful loneliness of a boy far from 
home, may lead to vice and misery. The 



200 THE MISTAKES OF 

boy who is used to girls at home, and 
who knows in his new surroundings no 
such girls as he knew at home, no such 
girls as his sisters' friends, is only too 
likely to scrape an easy acquaintance 
with some of those inferior girls by whom 
every student is seen in a kind of glamour, 
and to whom acquaintance with students 
is the chief excitement of life. With little 
education, much giddy vanity, and no 
refinement, these girls may yet possess a 
sort of cheap attractiveness. They are, 
besides, easy to get acquainted with, easy 
to be familiar with, and interesting sim- 
ply because they are girls — for the time 
being, the only accessible girls. I need 
not dwell on the embarrassment, the sor- 
row, and even the crime, in which such 
friendships may end; but I may empha- 
size the responsibility of every man, 
young or old, towards every woman. 
" Every free and generous spirit," said 
Milton, " ought to be born a knight." 
It is the part of a man to protect these 



COLLEGE LIFE 201 

girls against themselves. If they know 
no better than to hint to a student that 
they should like to see his room some 
evening, he knows better than to take 
the hint, — better than to suffer them 
through him to do what, though it may 
not stain their character, may yet de- 
stroy their good name. No girls stand 
more in need of chivalry than these vain 
girls, not yet bad, who flutter about the 
precincts of a college. 

Students know what responsibility 
means ; but their views of it are dis- 
torted. They demand it of their elders ; 
in certain parts of athletics they demand 
it of themselves. Which is the worse 
breach of faith, to sit up a quarter of 
an hour later than your athletic trainer 
allows, or to betray the trust that father 
and mother have put in you, to gamble 
away or to spend on low women the 
money sent you for your term-bill, and 
to cover all with a lie ? 

It may be from a dim notion of these 



202 THE MISTAKES OF 

eccentricities in undergraduate judgment 
that many boys cultivate irresponsibility 
with a view to social success. Social am- 
bition is the strongest power in many a 
student's college life, a power compared 
with which all the rules and all the threats 
of the Faculty, who blindly ignore it, are 
impotent, a power that robs boys of their 
independence, leading them to do things 
foolish or worse and thereby to defeat 
their own end. For in the long run, — in 
the later years of the college course, — 
the " not there " and the " there " can be 
clearly distinguished. A student may be 
poor, he may not play poker, he may not 
drink, he may be free from all vice, he 
may not even smoke ; and yet, if his 
virtue is not showy, he will be popular 
— provided he " does something for his 
class." " He is a bully fellow," the students 
say. " He is in training all the time." 

I say little of responsibility to younger 
students. An older student who misleads 
a younger gets just about the name he 



COLLEGE LIFE 203 

deserves. Even the Sophomore who se- 
riously hazes a Freshman is now in the 
better colleges recognized as a coward. 
Cowardice once recognized, cannot long 
prevail ; yet there was a time when it 
took a deal of courage for a few young 
men in one of our great colleges to stop 
an outbreak of hazing. It took a deal 
of courage ; but they did it. After all, 
a student admires nothing so much as 
" sand." What he needs is to see that 
" sand " belongs not merely in war and 
athletics, but in everyday life, and that 
in everyday life "sand" may be accu- 
mulated. A Harvard student, it is said, 
was nearly dressed one morning and 
was choosing a necktie, when his door, 
which with the carelessness of youth he 
had left unlocked, suddenly opened. A 
woman entered, closed the door behind 
her, put her back to it, and said, " I want 
fifty dollars. If you don't give it to me, 
I shall scream." The young man, still 
examining his neckties, quietly replied, 



204 THE MISTAKES OF 

" You 'd better holler ; " and the woman 
went out. Had he given her money, had 
he even paid serious attention to her 
threat, he might have been in her power 
for life ; but his coolness saved him. An- 
other undergraduate, who before coming 
to college had worked as an engineer, 
and who was a few years older than 
most of his class, went one evening to 
an officer of the college who knew some- 
thing of him, and said, " I hardly know 
just how I ought to speak to you ; but 
in my building there is a Freshman who 
is going to pieces, and a Senior who is 
largely responsible for it." He then told 
what he had seen, and gave the names 
of both men. " If I look this up," said 
the college officer, "are you willing to 
appear in it? Are you willing to have 
your name known?" "I'd rather not 
be ' queered/ " he answered ; " but if it 
is necessary to be 'queered/ I will be." 
All this happened in a college which 
employs no spies and discourages tale- 



COLLEGE LIFE 205 

bearing. For anything the student knew, 
the officer himself might think him a 
malicious informer. The " sand " in the 
hero of the first of these little stories any 
boy would see. To see the " sand " in 
the hero of the second takes some ex- 
perience ; but " sand," and " sand " of 
the finest quality, was there. This man's 
notion of the responsibility of older stu- 
dents to younger ones had in it some- 
thing positive. "You have no idea," 
said a senator to Father Taylor, the 
sailor preacher, who had rebuked him 
for his vote, " You have no idea what the 
outside pressure was." " Outside pres- 
sure, Mr. Senator ! Outside pressure ! 
Where were your inside braces?" To 
run the risk of being thought a common 
informer when you are not, and to run 
it because you cannot let a man go under 
without trying to pull him out, requires 
such inside braces as few undergraduates 
possess. 

Let me say, however, that there is no 



206 THE MISTAKES OF 

better hope for Harvard College than in 
the readiness of the strong to help the 
weak. A youth is summoned to the col- 
lege office, behindhand in his work, and 
bad in his way of living. The Faculty 
has done its best for him, and to no pur- 
pose. A student of acknowledged stand- 
ing in athletics and in personal charac- 
ter appears at the office, and says, " I 
should like to see whether I can make 
that man work and keep him straight." 
This, or something like this, occurs so 
often that it is an important part of the 
college life. Moreover, when the strong 
man comes, he does not come with the 
foolish notion that he shall help the weak 
man in the eyes of the college office by 
pretending that he is not weak. He takes 
the case as it stands, knowing that his 
own purpose and that of the college of- 
fice are one and the same, — to keep the 
student, if he can be made into a man, 
and otherwise in all kindness to send 
him home. 



COLLEGE LIFE 207 

One more responsibility needs men- 
tioning here, — responsibility to our 
work. In college, it is said, a man of 
fair capacity may do well one thing 
beside his college work, and one thing 
only. Those of us who are so fortunate 
as to earn our own living must spend 
most of our waking hours in work. It 
follows that we must learn to enjoy work 
or be unhappy. Now we learn to enjoy 
work by working; to get interested in 
any task by doing it with all our strength. 
This is the first lesson of scholarship : 
without it we cannot be scholars ; and 
only by courtesy can we be called stu- 
dents. This is the first lesson of happy 
activity in life. In athletics, in music, 
in study, in business, we "train" our- 
selves toward the free exercise of our 
best powers, toward the joy that comes of 
mastery. A college oarsman once de- 
clared that after a season on the slides he 
felt able to undertake anything. The in- 
tellectual interests of a modern university 



208 THE MISTAKES OF 

are bewildering and intense. Among 
them every intelligent youth can find 
something worthy of his best labors, 
something in which his best labors will 
yield enjoyment beyond price. Right- 
minded students see the noble oppor- 
tunity in a college life ; and there is no 
sadder sight than the blindness of those 
who do not see it until it is lost for- 
ever. 

While speaking of the intellectual 
side of college life, I may warn students 
against becoming specialists too early. 
Every study has some connection with 
every other and gets some light from 
it ; but a specialty, seriously undertaken, 
compels a close study of itself, and may 
leave little time for other study. An un- 
enlightened specialist is a narrow being ; 
and he who becomes an exclusive spe- 
cialist before he has been in college two 
years is usually unenlightened. Even 
after the choice of a specialty, a stu- 
dent, like a professional man, may wisely 



COLLEGE LIFE 209 

reserve one corner of his mind for some- 
thing totally different from his specialty, 
and may find in that little corner a relief 
which makes him a better specialist It 
is good for a man buried in a chemical 
laboratory to take a course in English 
poetry; it is good for a man steeped 
in literature to have a mild infusion of 
chemistry. 

The lazy student (if I may return to 
him now) finds the thread of his study 
broken by his frequent absences from 
the lecture room, and finds the lecture 
hour a long, dull period of hard seats and 
wandering thoughts. Note-taking would 
shorten the hour, soften the seats, sim- 
plify the subject, and make the whole 
situation vastly more interesting. No 
matter if some clever students are willing 
to sell him notes, and he has no scruples 
about buying them ; the mere process 
of note-taking, apart from the education 
and training in it, gives him something 
to do in the lecture room, makes it im- 



210 THE MISTAKES OF 

possible for him not to know something 
of the subject, and shortens his period 
of cramming for examination. I believe, 
further, that a student's happiness is in- 
creased by a time-table of regular hours 
for work in each study. The prepara- 
tion of theses, and the necessity of using 
library books when other people are not 
using them, make it hard now and then 
to follow a time-table strictly ; but in gen- 
eral such a table is a wonderful saver of 
time. If a student leaves one lecture 
room at ten and goes to another at twelve 
and has no idea what he wishes to do 
between ten and twelve, he is likely to 
do nothing. Even if he has determined 
to study, he loses time in getting under 
way — in deciding what to study. Work 
with a time-table tends to promptness in 
transition ; and when the time-table for 
the day is carried out, the free hours are 
truly free, a time of clear and well-earned 
recreation. At school the morning rou- 
tine is prescribed by the teacher. At col- 



COLLEGE LIFE 211 

lege, where it should be prescribed by 
the student, it frequently breaks down. 
A man's freedom, as viewed with a boy's 
eyes, is liberty to waste time : it is the 
luxury of spending the best ' morning 
hours in a billiard room, or loafing in a 
classmate's " study ; " the joy of hearing 
the bell ring and ring for you, while you 
sit high above the slaves of toil and puff 
the smoke of cigarettes with the superb 
indifference of a small cloud-compelling 
Zeus. The peculiar evil in cigarettes 
I leave for scientific men to explain ; I 
know merely that among college stu- 
dents the excessive cigarette smokers are 
recognized even by other smokers as re- 
presenting the feeblest form of intellec- 
tual and moral life. At their worst they 
have no backbone ; they cannot tell (and 
possibly cannot see) the truth ; and they 
loaf. Senator Hoar, in an address to 
Harvard students, remarked that in his 
judgment the men who succeed best in 
life are the men who have made the best 



212 THE MISTAKES OF 

use of the odd moments at college, and 
that, contrary to the general opinion, it is 
worse to loaf in college than to loaf in a 
professional school. The young lawyer, 
he observed, who has neglected the law 
may make up his deficiencies in the 
early years of his practice ; "he will 
have plenty of time then : " but there is 
no recovery of the years thrown away at 
college. 

Once more, if we could only teach by 
the experience of others, we should save 
untold misery. I met not long since a 
young business man who had been for 
four years on and off probation in Har- 
vard College and had not yet received his 
degree. In college he had seemed dull. 
He probably thought he worked, because 
his life was broken into, more or less, by 
college exercises, which he attended with 
some regularity. Now he is really work- 
ing, with no time to make up college defi- 
ciencies, ready to admit that in college 
he hardly knew the meaning of work, 



COLLEGE LIFE 213 

and to say simply and spontaneously, "I 
made a fool of myself in college." An- 
other student, who did nothing in his 
studies, who spent four or five thousand 
dollars a year, and who constantly hired 
tutors to do his thinking, was finally 
expelled because he got a substitute to 
write an examination for him. Home 
trouble followed college trouble ; he was 
thrown on himself and into the cold 
world ; and he became a man. From 
scrubbing street cars, he was promoted 
to running them ; from running them to 
holding a place of trust with men to do 
his orders. " Every day," he said, " I 
feel the need of what I threw away at 
college. Do you think if I came back I 
should need any more tutors ? I'd go 
through quicker than anything, with no- 
body to help me. What sent me away 
was the one dishonest thing in my life." 
The dishonest thing came about through 
loafing. 

Even socially, as I have intimated, the 



214 THE MISTAKES OF 

loafer seldom or never wins the highest 
college success. Graduating classes be- 
stow their honors on men who have 
" done something," — athletics, college 
journalism, debating, if you will, not 
necessarily hard study in the college 
course, but hard and devoted work in 
something, and work with an unselfish 
desire to help the college and the class. 
At Harvard College in the class of 1899 
all three marshals graduated with dis- 
tinction in their studies. By the begin- 
ning of the Senior year the class knows 
the men to be relied on, the men who 
are " there," and knows that they are 
men of active life. 

I have spoken earlier of a student's 
responsibility to some unknown girl who 
is to be his wife. What is his respon- 
sibility to a known girl with whom 
in college days he falls in love? Just 
as college Faculties are blind to the ef- 
fect of social ambition in students, they 
are blind to the effect of sweethearts. I 



COLLEGE LIFE 215 

do not quite know what they could do 
if their eyes were opened ; for college 
rules, happily, must be independent 
of sweethearts. I mean merely that 
scores of cases in which students break 
rules, " cut " lectures, disappear for a 
day or two without permission, and 
do other things that look rebellious, 
are readily accounted for by the disqui- 
eting influence of girls. What students 
do (or don't) when they are in love is 
a pretty good test of their character. 
One drops his work altogether, and de- 
votes what time he cannot spend with 
the girl to meditating upon her. He can 
think of nothing else; and accordingly 
for her sake he becomes useless. Another 
sets his teeth, and works hard. " She is," 
he says naturally enough, "infinitely 
above me. How She ever can care for 
me, I do not know ; whether She ever 
will, I do not know ; but I will be what 
I can and do what I can. I will do what- 
ever I do as if I were doing it for Her. 



216 THE MISTAKES OF 

I am doing it for Her. If I succeed, it 
will be through Her ; if my success pleases 
Her, I shall be repaid." 

No girl worth having will think better 
of a man for shirking his plain duty in 
order to hang about her. No girl likes 
a " quitter ; " and most girls agree with 
the heroine of Mr. Kipling's beautiful 
story, "William the Conqueror," when 
she says, " I like men who do things." 
The story shows with profound and ex- 
quisite truth how two persons of strong 
character may grow into each other's 
love and into an understanding of it by 
doing their separate duties. To go on, 
girl or no girl, without excuses small or 
great ; to do the appointed task and to 
do it cheerfully amid all distractions, all 
sorrows, all heartaches ; to make routine 
(not blind but enlightened routine) your 
friend — thus it is that by and by when 
you meet the hard blows of the world 
you can 

" Go labor on ; spend and be spent." 



mm 



COLLEGE LIFE 217 

Thus it is that you find the strength 
which is born of trained capacity for in- 
terest in daily duty. 

On the banks of the Connecticut is a 
school without a loafer in it. The schol- 
ars are needy for the most part, and so 
grimly in earnest that only a printed 
regulation restrains them from getting 
up " before 5 A. M." without permission. 
I am far from recommending study be- 
fore breakfast, or loss of the night's sleep ; 
but I admire the whole-hearted energy 
with which these boys and grown men 
seize the opportunity of their lives. I 
admire the same energy in athletics, if a 
student will only remember that his ath- 
letics are for his college, not his college 
for his athletics. 

One more caution for college life and 
for after life. Do not let your ideals get 
shopworn. Keep the glory of your youth. 
A man with no visions, be he young or 
old, is a poor thing. There is no place 
like a college for visions and ideals ; and 



218 THE MISTAKES OF 

it is through our visions, through our 
ideals, that we keep high our standard 
of character and life. No man's charac- 
ter is fixed ; and no responsible man is 
overconfident of his own. It is the part 
of every boy when he arrives at man- 
hood to recognize as one of his greatest 
dangers the fading of the vision, and to 
set himself against this danger with all 
his might. It is only the man with ideals 
who is founded on a rock, and resists the 
rains and the floods. 

A vigorous young fellow, fresh from 
college, went into a business house at 
four dollars a week, and rapidly rose 
to a well-paid and responsible position. 
One day he received from a member of 
the firm an order to do something that 
he thought dishonorable. He showed 
the order to the member of the firm 
whom he knew best, and asked him 
what he thought of it. 

"Come and dine with me," said his 
patron, " and we will talk it over." 



COLLEGE LIFE 219 

" Excuse me," said the young man. 
"Any other day I should be glad to 
dine with you ; but this matter is busi- 
ness. " 

"Look!" said the other. "Business 
is war ; and if you do not do these things 
in business, you can't live." 

"I don't believe it," said the young 
man. " If I did, I should n't be here. I 
leave your employ Saturday night ; " — 
and, to the amazement of the firm, he 
left it forever. 

" And virtue's whole sum is but know and dare," 

said a great poet in one of his great- 
est moments. It takes a man with ideals 
to begin all over again, abandoning the 
kind of work in which he has won con- 
spicuous success, and abandoning it be- 
cause he finds that its methods, though 
accepted by business men generally, are 
for him dishonorable. 

In and out of college the man with 
ideals helps, so far as in him lies, his 



220 THE MISTAKES OF 

college and his country. It is hard for a 
boy to understand that in life, whatever 
he does, he helps to make or mar the name 
of his college. I have said " in life " — I 
may say also " in death.'' Not long since, 
I saw a Harvard Senior on what proved 
to be his death-bed. The people at the 
hospital declared that they had never 
seen such pain borne with such fortitude, 
— " and," said the Medical Visitor of the 
University, " he was through it all such 
a gentleman." A day or two before his 
death an attendant asked him whether 
he felt some local pain. " I did not," said 
he, "until you gave me that medicine." 
Then instantly he added, miserably weak 
and suffering as he was, " I beg your 
pardon. You know and I don't. It may 
be the medicine had nothing to do with 
my pain." I believe no man or woman 
in the ward saw that boy die without 
seeing also a new meaning and a new 
beauty in the college whose name he 
bore. As has often been said, the youth 



COLLEGE LIFE 221 

who loves his Alma Mater will always 
ask, not " What can she do for me?" but 
" What can I do for her ? " 

Responsibility is — first, last, and al- 
ways — the burden of my song, a stu- 
dent's responsibility to home, to fellow 
students, to school, to college, and (let 
me add once more) to the girl whom he 
will ask some day to be his wife. " Moral 
taste," as Miss Austen calls it, is no- 
thing without moral force. "If," said a 
college President to a Freshman class, 
" you so live that in a few years you will 
be a fit companion for an intellectual, 
high-minded, pure-hearted woman, you 
will not go far wrong." Keep her in 
mind always, or, if you are not imagina- 
tive enough for that, remember that the 
lines 

" No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace 
As I have seen in one autumnal face " 

were written of a good man's mother. 



MATER FORTISSIMA 



MATER FORTISSIMA 

PHI BETA KAPPA POEM, CAMBRIDGE, JUNE 25, 1903 

Again the song the fathers sang before us ! 

The cheer that rings through voice and heart 
again ! 
The multitudinous triumphant chorus ! 

The mighty mother marshalling her men ! 

"Come — for behold the East and West are 
merging ; 
The frozen Arctic greets the scorching Line ; 
Come, like the waves on strong New England 
surging ; 
Come, for to-day the seas and skies are mine ! " 

And we, who own no queen on earth above her, 
We, who from boyhood know her sovereign 
sway, 

Her sons, her knights, and every knight her lover, 
Her minute-men — we hear her and obey. 

A thousand more their loyal vows have plighted ; 
A thousand more low at her feet have kneeled ; 



226 MATER FORTISSIMA 

And every man, upspringing newly knighted, 
Hath lifted high God's truth upon his shield. 

And she, who wears the wisdom of the ages, 
She, who in everlasting youth abides, 

She, who her sons, the heroes, martyrs, sages, 
From youth to manhood and to glory guides, — 

" Go forth," she cries, " from strength to strength 
forever ; 

Serve me by serving God and man," she saith ; 
" Steadfast, upright, of strong and high endeavor, 

Fear nothing, and be faithful unto death." 



For the message of the Master 

Down the centuries has rolled ; 

And the Pilgrims heard the burning word 

Like Evangelists of old ; 

In the cabin of the Mayflower, 
When the northwind swept the seas, 
In tongues of flame the message came 
To the women on their knees ; 

To the fathers of New England, 

To the bold men of the Bay, 

Who lodged in the lair of the wolf and the bear, 

And the red man fierce as they ; 



MATER FORTISSIMA 227 

And the grave young scholar hearkened 
To the Master's high behest 
As he watched the day fly far away 
To the darkness of the west. 



And westward still he watches, 
The width of our wide land, 
As he sits alone on a pillar of stone 
With his Bible in his hand. 

Be it mountain, lake, or prairie, 

Be it city strong and fair, 

Be it east or west that his eyes shall rest, 

He sees New England there. 

Be it east or west that his eyes shall rest, 
New England stands the same ; 
For God and the right, at the front of the fight 
Are the men that bear her name. 

For the message of the Master 
She has breathed with every breath ; 
And come what will, New England still 
Shall be faithful unto death. 



Harvard, all hail to the mother that reared thee, 
Mother whose grace and whose glory thou 
art! 



228 MATER FORTISSIMA 

Hail to New England, who loved thee and cheered 
thee, 
Nestling thee close to her heroine's heart ! 

Here in the wilderness bravely she bore thee, 
Guarded thee, guided thee, prayed for thee 
then : 
" God in the pillar of fire be before thee ; 

Child of New England, be mother of men ! 

" Men who shall live in the light of thy vision, 
Men who shall welcome at duty's command 
Riches or poverty, praise or derision — 

Men who shall work, with the head and the 
hand: 

" Not the dull heart of the meaningless stoic ; 
Quick with the fires of unquenchable youth, 
Quivering yet calm, like the martyrs heroic, 
Living or dying, triumphant in truth." 

From the North, from the South, from the East, 

from the West, 
They come, to be born again ; 
To the North, to the South, to the East, to the West, 
They go, to prove them men. 
In the field, at the desk, at the court, in the mart, 
With the joy in their eyes and the fire in their heart, 
To struggle, to strive, to obey, to command, 
To work, and to leaven the land. 



MATER FORTISSIMA 229 

When the trumpet blew a shriller blast 

And the loud alarum rang, 
Marching, galloping, thick and fast, 
Forward, forward, on to the last, 

Forward again they sprang ! 
Wounded and bleeding and dying and dead — 
On to the last where the captain led, 
Bursting the battlements overhead 

Where the biting bullets sang. 

Danger and death and devotion they saw ; 

Harvard had heroes then : 
Perkins and Dalton and Savage and Shaw, 

Lowell, and Lowell again ; 
First in counsel and first to ride 
To death as the bridegroom to meet the bride — 

Lovers and leaders of men. 

There is one who knew them and loved them well, 

Never a braver than he. 
Like them he fought and like them he fell : 
Yet he lives to wear with a soldier's grace 
The scar of the sword-cut on his face ; 
He lives to work in the wondrous light 
That shone for the shepherds on Christmas night ; 
With heart to love and with hand to guide 
He nobly lives as he would have died, 
For the truth that makes men free. 



230 MATER FORTISSIMA 

The truth that makes men free — there came a seer 
With radiant smile, whose eyes profound and keen 
Burnt through the mist that shrouds the wildering 

scene, 
Of love and life and death, and saw them clear 
As noonday ; who, serenely standing near 
To the great heart of Nature, banished fear 
From all that knew his presence. Where he trod 
Is hallowed ground ; for, lo, he walked with God. 

The truth that makes men free — behold, there came 

A prophet with the poet's noblest art, 

In stature like a giant, and in heart 

Wide as the world, with lips and soul aflame 

Christ and His church forever to proclaim ; 

Impetuous, kingly, true, whose very name 

Wrought righteousness, whose sweet and surging 

voice 
Lifted the saddened soul to wonder and rejoice. 

The truth that makes men free — the scholar sweet 
Who taught us how the daisy's poet sang, 
Whose vibrant voice in mirth or sadness rang 
Out from the warmest heart that ever beat. 
Quick, generous, open, learned — him we greet 
Once more in June, with roses at his feet, 
To learn of him who knew as none shall know 
The brave and simple songs of long ago. 



MATER FORTISSIMA 231 

Harvard has heroes yet ; unspotted, brave, 
Free-hearted, strong, rejoicing still in youth, 

Even here the leader of our nation gave 
His vow to live for righteousness and truth. 

Harvard has heroes yet ; supreme, victorious, 
Leader of leaders in the nation's van, 

Marching erect, behold her captain glorious 
Who gives his life to freedom and to man. 



From the North, from the South, from the East, 

from the West, 
They come, to be born again ; 
To the North, to the South, to the East, to the 

West, 
They go, to prove them men. 
In the field, at the desk, at the court, in the mart, 
With the joy in their eyes and the fire in their 

heart, 
To struggle, to strive, to obey, to command, 
To work, and to leaven the land. 



Again the song the fathers sang before us ! 

The cheer that rings through voice and heart 
again ! 
The multitudinous, triumphant chorus ! 

The mighty mother marshalling her men ! 



232 MATER FORTISSIMA 

O mother whose benignant arms enfold us, 
O heart of all New England, bravest, best, 

Whose voice, forever strong and sweet, hath told 
us 
That life is work and work alone is rest, 

God be thy guide as onward still thou farest ; 

Still breathe upon thy sons the hero's breath ; 
And still, as high and higher yet thou darest, 1 

Fear nothing ; " be thou faithful unto death." 



' Altiora semper audes 
Exitu cum prospero " 



Professor J. B. Greenough 
Harvard Hymn. 



EUctrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton &* Co. 
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 



EXCELLENT 
ESSAYS 



ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

By Theodore T. Munger 

Stimulating essays on religious and literary questions of 
the day. A paper of much significance to churchgoers is that 
on " The Church : Some Immediate Questions." Crown 
8vo. 

THE NEIGHBOR 

By Nathaniel S. Shaler 

This book is a study of human relations with especial re- 
ference to race prejudices, and an endeavor to found some 
new considerations as to the ways in which this hatred may 
be overcome. i2mo, $1.40, net. Postage extra. 

THE RIGHTS OF MAN 

By Lyman Abbott 

" A frank, clear, and interesting discussion of the underly- 
ing principles of government, interpreted from the Christian 
standpoint." — Hamilton Wright Mabie. Crown 8vo, 
gilt top, $1.30, net. Postpaid, $1.44. 

AMERICAN TRAITS 

By Hugo Miinsterberg 

" It is long since a book of essays has appeared so well 
worth the attention of thoughtful Americans." — Springfield 
Republican. Crown 8vo, $1.60, net. Postpaid, $1.74. 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

By Thomas Bailey Aldrich 

" A book made up of a delicious mixture of wit and wis- 
dom, anecdote and epigram, in the rich and rare manner of 
the author." — The Press. i2mo, #1.00, net. Postpaid, $1.07. 

THE GENTLE READER 

By Samuel M. Crothers 

" For genuine humor, graceful wit, and a style full of subtle 
allusiveness there has been nothing published for years like 
these essays." — Chicago Post. i2mo, $1.25, net. Postpaid, 
$1.37. 

ON THE THRESHOLD 

By Theodore T. Munger 

" It is the frank, wise, inspiring work of a man who carries 
a high ideal into the circumstances of an average American 
community." — The Century. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.00. 

ESSAYS IN IDLENESS 

By Agnes Repplier 

" Empnasizing constantly the fact that literature must en- 
tertain and delight as well as instruct, it is Miss Repplier's 
good fortune to be able to illustrate in her own practice this 
somewhat neglected doctrine." — The Outlook, New York. 
i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. 

LITERARY VALUES 

By John Burroughs 

" This little book contains a feast for any one with literary 
tastes. Mr. Burroughs is daring and original in his thought; 
this is what makes his work so stimulating and suggestive." 
— Chicago Record-Herald. l6mo, gilt top, $1.10, net. Post- 
paid, $1.20. 



A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION 

By Bliss Perry 

" In clearness, brevity, insight, breadth of view and help- 
fulness of suggestion it is without a peer." — Chicago Record- 
Herald. Crown 8vo, $1.25, net ; postpaid. 

MERE LITERATURE 

By Woodrow Wilson 

" It warms our hearts, and sends the blood dancing in our 
veins, to read this spirited defense of literature." — Miss 
Agnes Repplier, in the Book-Buyer. 12010, gilt top, $1.50. 

SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND 
CHARACTER By LeBaron R. Briggs 

" This book is based, not on theory, but on an extended 
acquaintance with young men going back more than twenty 
years, and not with them alone, but with their fathers, mo- 
thers, and guardians." — Chicago Post. i6mo, $1.00, net. 
Postpaid, $1.08. 

THE CLERK OF THE WOODS 

By Bradford Torrey 

" Mr. Torrey's pages pulsate with natural life. The book 
is worthy of a place on the shelf where are already the works 
of Thoreau and Burroughs." — The Outlook, New York. i6mo, 
$1.10, net. Postpaid, $1.19. 

LEE AT APPOMATTOX 

By Charles Francis Adams 

" The tenor of these papers is admirable. Talent, sound 
judgment, and unusual knowledge of men and events give the 
author rare equipment for such work." — Boston Advertiser. 
Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50, net. Postpaid, $1.65. 



TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH 
First Series By Arlo Bates 

"If you wish improvement in the matter of language, I 
suggest that you read the two admirable books by Arlo 
Bates, 'Talks on Writing English.'" — Christian Endeavor 
World. Crown 8vo, #1.50. 

TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH 
Second Series By Arlo Bates 

" These ' Talks ' are of the greatest value in the study of 
English speaking and writing, and have value as exceedingly 
interesting essays in themselves, clear in expression, full of 
enthusiasm, and frequently sparkling with wit." — Boston 
Daily Advertiser. Crown 8vo, $1.30, net. Postpaid, $1.42. 

THE FIELD OF ETHICS 

By George H. Palmer 

" Singularly clear, sane, and illuminating. Prof. Palmer's 
positive definitions are distinctly good. The style and man- 
ner specially win the reader." — Chicago Post. i2mo, $1.10, 
net. Postpaid, $1.21. 

THE NATURE OF GOODNESS 

By George H. Palmer 

" Conscious self-sacrifice for worthy spiritual ends, worked 
out through wise selection of unconscious natural means, 
shines through each section, and binds every page into the 
unity of one splendid whole." — President W. D. Hyde 
i2mo,$i.io, net. Postpaid, $ 1 . 2 1 . 



COMMENTS OF JOHN RUSKIN ON 
THE DIVINA COMMEDIA 

Compiled by George P. Huntington 
With an Introduction by Chas. Eliot Norton 

" A comprehensive study of Dante's work is really pre- 
sented in this volume. The grouping of the passages will 
prove very helpful to the student." — Chicago Post. Crown 
8vo, $1.25, net. Postpaid, $1.37. 

AIDS TO THE STUDY OF DANTE 

By Charles A. Dinsmore 

" To introduce readers to the age and the man is the first 
purpose of Mr. Dinsmore's most helpful book, a purpose 
carried out with rare discrimination and happily supplemented 
by the author's own contributions at essential points." — The 
Congregationalist, Boston. Large crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50, 
net. Postpaid, $1.66. 

THE SPIRITUAL SENSE OF DANTE'S 
DIVINA COMMEDIA 

By William T. Harris 

" It is throughout simple, beautiful, and profound, and an 
admirable contribution to the moral and spiritual understand- 
ing of literature and life." — The Evangelist, New York. 
i2mo, gilt top, $1.25. 

THE DE MONARCHIA OF DANTE 

Translated by Aurelia Henry 

A clear, adequate translation of Dante's famous essay on 
Government, which has hitherto been inaccessible to the gen- 
eral reader. With Notes and Introduction. Crown 8vo, gilt 
top, $1.25, net. Postage extra. 



EDUCATION AND THE LARGER 
LIFE By C. Hanford Henderson 

" It deals with fundamental principles in life in a profound 
and encouraging way, and with education as a means of de- 
veloping human nature to its best estate of health, sensibility, 
nobleness, and power." — Boston Herald. Crown 8vo, $1.30, 
net. Postpaid, $1.43. 

ESSAYS ON GREAT WRITERS 

By Henry D. Sedgwick 

" The essays are of the highest type of critical literature, 
clear and vigorous, worth reading over and over again." — 
Chicago Journal. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50, net. Postpaid, 
$1.63. 

WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

By Washington Gladden 

"The names, bright in themselves, Dr. Gladden makes 
luminous by his revelations of the character of each." — Phil- 
adelphia Telegraph. Illustrated. i2mo, $1.25, net. Postpaid, 
$1.36. 

At all Bookstores. Sent on receipt of price by the Publishers. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY 

4 Park Street, Boston ; 85 Fifth Avenue, New York 



NOV S ,904 






